Verily I say unto thee, that High Plains Thumper spake thusly:
> Thus, they have caused the innocent to suffer when they should have
> been actively pursuing the law breakers and successfully prosecuting
> them with appropriate (just) sentences.
I find that nearly /all/ preventative measures designed to combat crime
have almost no affect on the target criminals, but only serve to make
innocent citizens suffer. One of the most conspicuous examples of this
is DRM (and various anti-copy measures) which don't even slow down the
so-called "pirates", but makes the lives of honest consumers an utter
misery of vendor lock-ins, non-interoperability and data loss.
> The US is literally becoming a police state
"Preventative" law enforcement is just a euphemism for Marshal Law,
because it essentially presumes guilt, not innocence. This is why people
in the American Empire® feel like victims, because their democratically
elected representatives are no longer /representing/ them, they've
condemned them all as criminals, at the behest of corporate interests.
The point that these supposed representatives have completely missed, is
that if a considerable majority of the population is behaving in a way
that contradicts some dubious legislation (e.g. file sharing), then
perhaps they should consider the fact that it's the /legislation/ that's
wrong ... not the people. If they were actually representing the
/people/ then they'd see that, but clearly they aren't, hence the
countries of the American Empire® are no longer democracies, and we have
now descended into fascism, or more precisely Corporatism - totalitarian
rule by business corporations.
> Getting back to the issue of music, I think the industry has gone
> mad. I can understand downloading of high quality music that one has
> not purchased of an artist's work, who is still living and owed a
> just royalty. There ought to be prosecution of such.
An increasing number of people disagree. In Sweden they even have a
political party representing that view. As I've said before, it seems
few people have much respect (or even understanding) of this strange
thing called copyright. That's because it's unnatural, contradicts human
nature and our instinctive desire to share, learn and grow through
cumulative effort. It's alien to our most basic instincts. This has
nothing to do with malice, much less "theft".
Taking a photograph of someone's car, is not synonymous with stealing
that car, so why should making a copy of a CD be considered theft?
People have been conditioned into thinking the way the Intellectual
Monopolists want them to about "IP", but the whole story is just a
fairytale.
Unfortunately, this fairytale is enforced by /law/, so those who refuse
to believe the fairytale run the risk of prosecution.
My way of dealing with this dilemma is to neither break the law /nor/
believe the fairytale ... I just don't read it at all, and choose Free
software (in the wider sense of the word "software") instead.
The Intellectual Monopolists can /keep/ their precious "IP". May they
choke on it.
--
K.
http://slated.org
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| "The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which
| the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf
| denounces him for the same act, as the destroyer of liberty.
| Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of
| the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today
| among human creatures." ~ Abraham Lincoln
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Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.26.8-57.fc8
02:43:19 up 10 days, 6:41, 3 users, load average: 8.88, 7.48, 6.89
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