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Belgian Rightsholders Group Wants To Charge Libraries For Reading Books To Kids
New submitter BSAtHome writes "People with a healthy interest in fundamental freedoms and basic human rights have probably heard about SABAM, the Belgian collecting society for music royalties, which has become one of the global poster children for how outrageously out-of-touch-with-reality certain rightsholders groups appear to be. This morning, word got out in Belgian media that SABAM is spending time and resources to contact local libraries across the nation, warning them that they will start charging fees because the libraries engage volunteers to read books to kids. Volunteers. Who – again – read books to kids."
I like to use the *old* for emphesis. Not because it's any better, but because it's a throwback to a time when we didn't need any of these fancy typesetting things to convey tone. ASCII was good enough then, and (with the addition of a bit of unicode for non-english text and math) it's good enough now.
Larval Belgians should be told WHY they cannot be read to, and encouraged to remember their enemies. You are never too young to remember who fucked you over, and you have a lifetime for payback.
Tell people "reading is subversive" if you want to get them to read.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I couldn't agree with you /more/. ASCII typesetting is a *beautiful* thing, with several major advantages:
- It's easy to read
- It requires _fewer_ characters to be entered than HTML typesetting
* You can easily come up with new typesetting styles on-the-fly and their meaning is usually obvious...
o ***Tradition, tradition***.
^ I wish more posters would return to the good old days for these reasons.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
These people are just evil.
Courts are there so that people do not resort to /other means/ for just ice.
Bullying libraries and others because you're not making enough (in your twisted world) short term money (hey guys, teaching kids to love books and reading means you have future customers) means you are a leech on society and you should be removed. Permanently.
I suggest it's time for /other means/
--
BMO
Then I think many will appreciate Markdown.
Keep your eyes to the sky.