Verily I say unto thee, that The Ghost In The Machine spake thusly:
> In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Homer <usenet@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote on Tue, 06
> May 2008 21:30:18 +0100 <rnr6f5-5in.ln1@xxxxxxxxxx>:
>> Use and distribution are not the same, and even with distribution
>> there are first-sale rights. If Intellectual Property truly is
>> property, then once purchased the buyer should be allowed to do
>> whatever he wants with it. Period.
>
> But what is the buyer buying? Certainly not the work proper; it is
> still owned by the owner (even the most diehard freeware/freemedia
> advocates have to concede that point!). At best, we're buying a
> license to play, with a convenient local duplicate of the finished
> work.
The Intellectual Monopolists argue that the buyer is paying for limited
"rights", but I would argue that such "rights" have no meaning in terms
of /knowledge/, which is after all what the written word; music and the
film and television "content" is. That "content" is /not/ a product, it
is a service, much like a live concert is a service. One /pays/ artists
for what they /do/ (work), not for what they /know/. Everything else is
just a facsimile *copy* of that original /service/, and demanding money
and exclusivity for (what amounts to) the /memory/ of that original act
is pure extortion. That's not paying people for their work, it's paying
them because they claim ownership of the *memory* of an original event.
Facsimiles can not be property, in any sense other than material costs,
and therefore those who distribute facsimiles should neither be able to
claim exclusivity, nor charge more than material costs.
We live in a society that supports the idea that knowledge can be owned
and controlled, and there are even laws to enforce such twisted ideals,
but that in no way makes it /right/. One's private thoughts are another
matter, but once knowledge becomes public it /should/ be treated as the
property of public domain. Attempting to enforce exclusivity on it is a
gross perversion of creativity, mutating art into a /cattle market/; an
artist into a sacrificial cow; and those who purportedly "help" artists
into cynical harvesters of souls, who sit on their fat behinds, pushing
a "copy" button that duplicates those souls for profit.
--
K.
http://slated.org
.----
| 'When it comes to knowledge, "ownership" just doesn't make sense'
| ~ Cory Doctorow, The Guardian. http://tinyurl.com/22bgx8
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Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.23.8-63.fc8
23:52:52 up 137 days, 20:28, 5 users, load average: 0.01, 0.04, 0.00
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