Re: classifying P2P traffic - what about legit uses? Part Deux

[Kevin Shalla <kshalla () UIC EDU>]

Another part of the message that's unrelated to economics is the
ethical one: it's WRONG!

People do things that are seemingly not in their best interest
because they derive some benefit in acting ethically.  Think about
pollution and addressing it with recycling.  People voluntarily spend
extra time rinsing bottles, jars and cans, and sorting out recyclable
stuff from trash because they believe (rightly, I think) that it is
worthwhile to spend this extra time to have the rest of the world
benefit from our activity.  These people see no direct benefit from
this activity other than the feeling that they're behaving responsibly.

When doing research on the history of Disney a few years ago, I
remember being surprised to learn of one of the projects that Disney
worked on during WWII.  Income taxes were being levied, and Disney
was asked to provide marketing for the program.  When he asked why
the government would need marketing around a compulsory program, he
was told that it simply couldn't put 50,000 people in jail for not
paying taxes.  Before the tax program could be successful, nearly all
of the eligible taxpayers had to believe that it was a good thing to do.

While I agree that the threat of punishment is necessary, there's
also this other aspect - ethics - which needs to be accepted into our culture.

At 09:13 AM 1/30/2008, Roger A. Safian wrote:
> Joel said it simply: "if it's against the law and
> >you get caught, you are in trouble." Hammer that message to your user
> >community and we start to solve this problem.
>
> Who hasn't been hammering this message?  We have, for years, and in the end,
> I'm not sure it matters.  It doesn't matter because we are trying to fight
> "free" and that's a losing battle.  As long as the penalties are fairly
> minor, and the odds of legal action are long, our communities are going
> to continue to do this.  I haven't spoken to anyone who in the last few
> years, who didn't already know the risks.  They might not all have come right
> out and said that, but, you can tell they knew what they were doing.  In
> some ways this is like speeding.  We all know it's wrong, yet many people
> still do it.