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The RIAA and French Button-Makers

Posted by kdawson on from the before-buggy-whips dept.

Alien54 writes "Requiring permission to innovate? Feeling entitled to search others' property? Getting the power to act like law enforcement in order to fine or arrest those who are taking part in activities that challenge your business model? Don't these all sound quite familiar? Centuries from now (hopefully much, much sooner), the actions of the RIAA, MPAA and others that match these of the weavers and button-makers of 17th century France will seem just as ridiculous."

3 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. other examples of history repeating itself by circletimessquare · · Score: 5, Informative

    in the mid 1800s, it was customary for the usa to give the finger to european copyright laws and publish any book they wanted to, without any royalties sent to the old world

    now we have the usa whining to china/ thailand/ indonesia/ etc to enforce american IP laws, with beijing playing lipservice for political and economic reasons while on the streets of hong kong you can still buy $10,000 worth of software bundled on a CD/ DVD for $3

    and obviously, in 150 years, china will be issuing diplomatic myspace invectives to azerbaijan for stealing it's genetic code for it's zero G, no atmosphere moon crops... or whatever

    --
    intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
    1. Re:other examples of history repeating itself by HugePedlar · · Score: 5, Informative

      Even more ironic: The film industry set itself up in California in the far West to avoid (by way of lots of geography) all those nasty patents on filming techniques that existed on the East Coast. Hollywood would never have existed had not the film studios decided to break IP law.

      --
      Argh.
  2. Page Not Found by gQuigs · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/085eb68e1d35f85a0 11622abd62ced01/index.html