On Sat, 11 Jan 2003, Nadav Har'El wrote: > And excuse me for being pessimistic, but I have a hunch that if the current > trends continues, book libraries will also be a thing of the past in 20 years. > How long do you think the book publishers will agree to stay out of the pay- > per-use or pay-per-eyeball party? Why should they agree to have their books > lent out, when the CD and DVD publishers don't let you do that (unless the > rental place pays them percentages?). > See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html for a story about this.
> > But charging money has nothing to do with freedom. > > The fact that Stallman repeats this over and over, doesn't necessarily > make that true. > > Charging money does have something to do with freedom, at least the specific > sense we're discussing now (being free from corporate control). If a person > has a billion dollars, he doesn't care that he's not free to move his DVD > collection from the US to Israel - he just leaves them in the US and has his > servants get the same ones for him in Israel. Or he pays a million dollars > to the studio to have a special all-zone DVD made just for him. > A person without money is obviously not free to use that option. A FREE movie, software, book, whatever will allow you to produce a copy at zero cost. So, the billionare could go and buy additional copies, but the average Joe will be able to copy from his/her friends. This is similar to the law in Canada that allows you to copy CDs you took from a library. Alon -- This message was sent by Alon Altman ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) ICQ:1366540 The RIGHT way to contact me is by e-mail. I am otherwise nonexistent :) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- -=[ Random Fortune ]=- "Only a brain-damaged operating system would support task switching and not make the simple next step of supporting multitasking." -- George McFry ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
