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After writing up a comment on an article over at Techcrunch on Japan's banning of file sharing, I noticed how inflammatory, passionate and controversial the article was.  Every time the topic of piracy occurs, it invokes an incredibly sensitive point in people and it really is a polarized issue, boiling down to the Have's and Have-Not's.  This issue has been around forever and has been a leading subject of political discourse.  Two well known philosophers, John Locke and Carl Marx had differing but yet similar intents in describing the notion of capital, property, one's rights.

On the one hand, John Locke essentially felt that when one creates something, they therefore own it (link to Wikipedia's entry)  This is the basis of intellectual property in that ownership is an effect of one's work.  I think part of his writings were due to the environment of him living in a period where kings essentially owned their peasants.  So if a peasant grew a fruit, the king, as owner of the land, had all the rights to it.  In response, Locke came up with a way of repudiating monarchy through his theory on intellectual property (or just ownership).

While Marx's philosophy is socialist and his views on ownership differ, I think the intent for his writings is not too dissimilar.  One key point in Marx's writing was the notion of how capital and production works.  Essentially, the means of production are what enables people to have control.  (link to Wikipedia's entry) The book Dune paraphrases this idea with saying, "He who controls the spice, controls the universe."  The similarity in intent goes to the fact that people want and need control and want to do away with the middle man to live a prosperous life.

This is the biggest point of contention in society now with regards to media labels and file sharers.  The media people, in Marx's words, are the ones who keep control over the means of production.  They are NOT the people who are the laborers creating the objects as John Locke would state, but they end up being owners because they have the power to back themselves up.  They are the middlemen who have fields of corn, rice, and other pieces of food that we think we need.  They stand in between the artists and the consumer, reaping the rewards, controlling what can be released and how much they can get in return.

Obviously, the biggest threat to these big media companies are the threat of removing them as a middle man through these new manners of distribution (which is something that Locke nor Marx had failed to address in their writings).  The media industry essentially at this point are parasites, living off like the monarchs of old, enslaving labor and threatening neighbors for picking up fruits that fell to the ground.  These industries, along with other middle men distributors like retailers, are not the creators and in truth do not own, in Locke's view and from a spiritual point of view, the true intellectual property of the artists.  The media companies only own the legal rights because of the contracts that artists, desperate for money, end up signing.

Naturally, TV and movies get more complex because the means of production are far more complex compared with recording music.  You have more people involved in the labor, giving them a certain amount of rights as entitled to the writers, actors/actresses, directors and whatnot.  Then you get the investment money for production and this is where probably the studios hold the most power and are able to legally bind people.

At any rate, as I've said continuously, the world is constantly reverting towards medieval monarchism or oligarchies.  The people on top want as few people to join them to retain control and maintain the slave mentality so that they can enjoy their materialistic lives.  Sometimes I consider that the only recourse is the same philosophy that you'd see at the end of the movie The Godfather, by replacing the old to create a new wave of thought.