Fwd: Please Stand Against the New Copyright Bill

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: ted leslie <tleslie-RBVUpeUoHUc at public.gmane.org>

| Mr Chris Aitken <chris-n/jUll39koHNgV/OU4+dkA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
| 
| > Isn't all this about us wanting something for nothing? I mean isn't 
| > someone spending emotion, time, and money creating, developing and 
| > distributing something that we want it for nothing.

[Note: I'm not responding directly to what Chris actually said.  Chris: 
this is not meant as an attack on you.]

No amount of using the bogus phrase "intellectual property" will
convince me that information is the same as a physical thing.
I can "steal" information without removing the original.

Creators of information should have a variety of incentives to create
that information.  Ownership is not a good model for that.  Bounded
monopoly of some kind seems to have worked in the past.

Let's, as a society, have a serious discussion of that.  Let's not
just let the big special interests craft that policy on their own.

Too bad that real society-wide decision making has to be based on tiny
sound-bites and slogans.  That's something really broken in our
democracy.

| My guess is it will turn back around to what it was in the 80's in the US, where
| people will get prosecuted for doing this if anymore more then "casually" 
| and it will put the fear into people. 
| But catching people thieving music on Internet, or stereo equipment from wall mart, or robbing money from a bank,
| its all the same - catch'm and slap them around a whole bunch, the world will be a lot better place.
| As for money grubbing record companies, and ticket master, etc, you'd hope a really good Internet ecommerce
| would keep those bastards in check. 
| 
| Do you sound like a idiot? no way!, your just not a thief, and that's a good thing! be proud of it, its a dying breed.

I think that this is exactly the wrong viewpoint.

There are two ways to enforce something:

- by compulsion

- voluntarily, with consent

Of course they are not mutually exclusive and there is a spectrum.

We have laws against stealing physical things.  We have police.  We
have social norms.  99% of the time it is the social norm that does
the work.

(Think of all the gun crime we hear about in Toronto.  It doesn't look
to me as if the problem can be solved by better policing.  The problem
appears to lie with the social norms.  In other words, police
effectiveness is more apparent than real.)

If we can get citizens to understand and buy into the model we will
need less repression to enforce it.  I want to live in a society where
the citizens, by in large, consent to the the rules.

Thinking of your customers as thieves is really sad.
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