[LINK] In other news....

[Janet Hawtin]

> > On Mon, Jun 25, 2007 at 03:51:41PM +1000, Stilgherrian wrote:
> >> If you make a copy of someone's copyrighted material without paying, you're
> >> depriving them of whatever profit they would have made had you acquired that
> >> copy according to the license they want you to follow.
> >
> > equally, if you don't ever buy their copyrighted work (whether you
> > copy/use it or not), you are depriving them of the income they would
> > have had if you had bought it.
> >
> > therefore, failure to consume is theft and should be punished by lengthy
> > gaol sentences.
> > furthermore, there should be no distinction by the courts between wilful
> > failure to consume and incidental or ignorant failure.

=) Well this is the line of thought that goes with TIVE and no rewind media.
Skipping the advertisements is theft. It is true that copyright is now
about the minutia of how we use information and not the bulk
publishing it was designed for.

> Let's be concrete. "You can have a copy of my book to read if you pay me
> $29". You say, "No, I'll just copy it and read it and not give you $29".
> Whatever you want to call it, it's not nice behaviour.
>
> You can jump up and down and say the book "should" be free for everyone to
> read -- but that wasn't the offer being made.

The problem is that
- I used to be able to buy a book and exchange it with a friend. Now
this is sometimes theft depending on the media format of the
information.
- I used to be able to buy a book and give it to a friend. Now this is
sometimes theft depending on the media ULA.
- Kids used to cut their fledgeling cartooning teeth on drawing daffy duck and
other images in their cultural context and stick them on the fridge.
Kids these days
use youtube as the fridge and putting your own voice and first efforts
into the mix is sometimes theft.
- A photo of me is not necessarily my property
- An ultrasound of me is not my property
- An xray of me is not my property
The distributed technologies we use now are a part of our social discourse.
Copyright is theft of our right to participate.

We need law which is written as though our participation was a core value
and it was important for us to feel free to try things and explore.
Copyright is obfuscated and single point of view, designed to catch us
out, it is not designed to facilitate a free culture.

We need personal space for collaborating and dialogue.
The internet makes us closer to each other, it also makes broadcast
based publishers interested in policing and profiting from individual
instances of use in  our homes. This is costing us our ability to use
information as a society.

Time for a new legal framework which does not buy profit at the
expense of freedom. Time to dump the theft discussion and look at new
ways to make business and free culture in the same framework.