It’s been big news since Napster was sued, and has remained a big issue to the thousands of file-sharers sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) since then. But piracy doesn’t just affect the music industry.
This summer, a friend and I were discussing various personal development courses we were either using or thinking of using, including fitness and language learning programs. Roughly half of these were not free, mostly the video or audio-based ones…and we weren’t planning on paying for them, now or ever.
I perked up at this oddity, realizing that if we were discussing this, there were likely other young nerds actually putting their ill-gotten goods to good use, gaining knowledge and skills that could never be robbed from them regardless of how much money you sued them for. I wondered what the future would look like even a generation from now.
With the sheer amount of information and ease of access afforded by the internet, as well as user friendliness, knowledge can spread virally. According to the Pirate Bay’s trackers, there are currently about three-hundred people downloading or uploading Rosetta Stone, a popular language learning software package. There are over 500 people downloading Pimsleur language learning courses on MiniNova.
For goods that are pirated, the theft of the object or the software, as is becoming more and more prevalent these days, affects the economic valuation of the individual directly – that is, that person is worth more money as the owner of that tangible good. In the case of pirated education, at least for personal use, the tangible value gained by the individual is far outweighed by the intangible value gained by the individual. There is no measuring the value of learning calculus.
That subtle difference is enough to endorse the piracy of education. As the saying goes, give a man a jar of peanut butter and he will make a sandwich; give George Washington Carver a peanut, and he will invent three hundred uses for peanuts. Education, as an intangible good, is immeasurably valuable for the reason that the knowledge gained will be put to use, transmitted, or forgotten, in which case the theft is rendered meaningless. If put to use, it is another addition to humankind’s endeavors, and it transmitted, the probability that it will be put to use magnified greatly.
However, the real question to ask is not if piracy of education is improving the world. As Chris Anderson says in his book Free, piracy is merely a symptom of demand-side pull on the price of a good. The real question is why is education so expensive? The college experience is now infamously expensive. Going to college requires payment for tuition, housing, and books, which alone have been experiencing price inflation at an unheard-of rate for any other market.
It seems as though the true goal of education has been shoved aside in the face of established traditions. The true goal of education, at its most basic level, is to transmit information. Ironically, Moore’s law and various corollaries in the IT industry describe the exponential rate at which our ability to store, process, and transmit information is growing.
The current model of education traces its roots back to Plato’s first philosophical academy millennia ago. And while people have not changed altogether too much physiologically or socially, the model remains a fairly good one. However, technology has improved more in the last 10 years than in the last 50, and more in the last 50 than the last 150, and so on. What worked then might work now…but it might not be the optimal solution. And technology may just be the key to finding a new, better solution.
Recently, Governor Schwarzenegger approved the use of open-source digital textbooks for California schools, which are free and openly accessible to the public, as well as being well updated. Even with the fastest printing presses, dead-tree media could never keep up with daily updates.
Education, if companies like Academic Earth, FlatWorld Knowledge, or Peer2Peer University are any indication, is on the verge of an extreme overhaul. Academic Earth partners with lecturers and universities to provide high quality educational lectures for free to learners, while FlatWorld knowledge seeks to revolutionize the printing industry with free, open-source, remixable educational materials – a direct attack on the educational media market. Meanwhile, Peer2Peer University brings users together in internet classrooms or study groups, making the learning process social and global at the same time.
Finding knowledge is becoming easier, and if the Western Governors University has its way, how you acquire that knowledge is not as important as finding it in the first place. WGU is an accredited online university that works on an examination basis – FastCompany, a business and design blog, tells of a student who had been working with a company for years without a bachelors degree who was able to take his industry knowledge and pass the examinations for a Bachelors degree in Information Technology in just months.
Chances are, anyone reading this article is a student. Not to depress you too much, but in a few years, the cost of education and even certification may have lowered radically. How radically? Recall the title of Chris Anderson’s book:
Free
