Slashdot Mirror
Copyright Defeats?
Uruk asks: "Over the last few years, we've seen what looks like the victory of copyright and business interest at the expense of the consumer. There's been The DMCA, the UCITA, all of the legal wranging over DeCSS, and so on. Copyright holders can even shut your website down without doing the research about whether or not it was appropriate. Johansen did seem to be acquited of some of what was brought against him as a result of the DeCSS situation, but that was in Norway. Does anyone know of any copyright or consumer victories on the net in the last few years? Something that limits the abilities of these laws, or otherwise acts in the copyright spirit of free use? My hat is off to GNU and EFF, even Project Gutenberg. What is the status of this ongoing battle? I'm looking for the sunny side to a situation that seems littered with defeat."
Serious, this could be the ONLY time goatse is relevant!
We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we know that it was they that scorched the sky. At the time we were dependent on companies playing nice with copyright and it was believed that they would be unable to survive without an IP source as abundant as freeware, shareware, the public domain, GPL, and expiring copyrights and patents. Throughout human history, we have been dependent on goodwill to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony. A PC's harddrive attached to the internet consumes more electricity than a 120-volt battery and serves more than 25,000 Kazaa files per day. Combined with a form of CD burner, we have found all the free content and software the world could ever need. There are fields, endless fields, where PC are no longer being used to word process company reports. They trade files. For the longest time I wouldn't believe it, and then I saw the fields with my own eyes. Watch them rip the contents of CDs so they could be turned into MP3s for portable players. And standing there, facing the pure horrifying precision, I came to realize the obviousness of the truth. What is the Matrix? Pirated. The Matrix is a computer generated dream which has probably been videotaped through the analogue hole so many times that 9 out of 10 people watching it will be seeing the backs of heads moving along the bottom edge of the screen, and the words "Distributor Sample Only! Not For Public Exhibition!" scrolling across the top.
OPERATION DARK STORM IS GO!