The standalone gas pump

Imagine that someone invented a standalone gas pump. One that didn't need to be connected to tanks of gasoline at a gas station or even the power grid, but could be used to fill up the tank of your car all by itself. The pump created gasoline from the carbon dioxide in the air around it and didn't produce any waste. Since the pump doesn't require any raw materials and was cheap to produce  you could use it practically for free.

Does it sound like a brilliant machine, and a solution to many of our world's problems? I think so, but on the other hand I'm pessimistic about how such a machine would be received by our society.

Why? Because when it comes to information such a machine has been invented, and some part of society seems to be at war with it. That machine is the idea of pee r to peer file sharing on the internet. Digital information can be copied and distributed to millions of users practically for free. I can have access to enormous amounts of high quality music and other media all for just the cost of my computer and my internet connection. The act of accessing that content doesn't stop others from getting it as well. The orignal creator of the content gets to keep it as well and do what she wishes with it.

Yet some multinational media corporations, not unlike the oil companies that make money off gasoline sales, claim that their revenue streams are hurt by this new invention and that they need compensation. Today the Pirate Bay trial began here in Sweden, where the prosecutor together with some lawyers representing US based media companies will try to put four guys in jail for running a website that lets internet users share and download digital content.

If you are making up your mind about if they should be convicted or not, think of them as the entrepreneurs responsible for trying to take the standalone gasoline pump from the inventor out to the world market. Sure, their actions probably hurt the companies that has made obscene amounts of money off selling small plastic discs containing music and movies in the last decade. Just like the standalone gas pump would definitely decrease the revenue of large oil companies and put many, many people working in the oil industry in unemployment.

But when you look at the bigger picture, a world where anyone and everyone can have access to a large part of the media that is produced, that is something really valuable for the whole society, and as a whole that is more valuable than the dramatic downside of media companies not being able to make as much money as they used to.

Would it be reasonable to call using the standalone gas pump stealing? One could argue that you would be stealing the money that Exxon would otherwise get from filling up your tank. If you would want to make a more emotional argument you could argue that , and that a small fraction the money you stole from Exxon would go to Saudi Arabia and that a small fraction of that would go to poor defenseless children crying in an orphanage.

The core of my argument is that no one should be guaranteed that their current business model should be protected from the effects of new technology the way that the media companies is trying to do now. Manufacturers of mechanical calculators were put out of business when the electronic calculators came along. It was painful for the companies and their employees, but for society as a whole we're better off with cheap, smart electronic calculators than with a healthy industry creating expensive, dumb mechanical calculators. This is true when it comes to file sharing on the internet and it would be true if the day would come when someone invents the standalone gas pump. Lets recognise this and change our laws accordingly.

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