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Harvard Law's Nesson Says P2P Is "Fair Use"
eldavojohn writes "Ars has been covering the story of Charlie Nesson (alias 'Billion Dollar Charlie') of Harvard Law who's tangoing with the RIAA in court. His approach has been revealed in e-mails on his blog and has confused everyone from Lawrence Lessig to the EFF. His argument is simple: file-sharing is legal as it is protected by fair use. I dare say that even the most avid file-sharers among us would be a bit skeptical of this line of reasoning."
No surprise that Lessig is unhappy with the approach. While lauded on Slashdot, Lessig only wants to restore copyright to the original length instead of abolishing it completely so that our music and film downloading habits are not threatened. I picked up Lessig's latest book Remix because I thought he was going to sock it to The Man, only to be aghast that he really just wants to replace a fairly monolithic Man with a bunch of smaller Men, and stifle the enormous benefit of filesharing.
Your an idiot!!!!!!!!! did you even read this article our did you just want to post for the fun of it you troll!!!!
And you wonder where all the money in the economy is going. Imagine you invent a machine that is able to make clothing with very very little energy and very little time. You get the government on your side so they force everyone to pay a dollar for a shirt even though it costs much less to make one. You get 1 dollar for something that costs 0.000005 cents for you to make. People will still pay up because they want to wear shirts and 1 dollar isn't too unreasonable. You will make a whole lot of profit for minimal labor.
Say you are a farmer who grows apples. A farmer trades a one dollar apple for a mp3 file, even though it took one dollar worth of work to grow that apple. You get a one dollar apple practically for free. When you eat that apple, the one dollar apple is lost forever, yet what is added to the world? The one dollar mp3 file is worthless... It is just a pattern of bits and bytes... The net value of the world decreased. It was as if the farmer did not grow that apple.
It was only in the creation of the song that deserves money, and that is definitely not worth the millions that artists get. It is just that they hold a monopoly and if you want a Bob Dylan mp3, you do not have anywhere else to buy it but from Bob Dylan, thanks to the government. You can either be forced to overpay or not listen to Bob Dylan.
It's not a zero-sum game. If I steal your car and crash it to a wreck, I've made no profit but it doesn't mean you haven't lost anything.
Likewise, just because you squander the value of that copyright doesn't mean the copyright holder hasn't lost anything.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings