<< If you make furniture, the fact that furniture-duplication wands are invented does not give you the right to restrict people from duplicating chairs.>>
++++ No, but I should have the rights to restrict people from duplicating MY chairs. ++++ That makes no sense. No chair is unique. They all follow a fundamental design: to provide a place to sit. YOUR chair will be a copy or a variation of a chair that has gone before it. Youre not a god of furniture: creating something out of nothing: youre just another twiddler in a long line of furniture twiddlers. You may not have slavishly copied another designers design, but you will (inadvertently) have copied parts of someone elses design. If you have to get paid over and over again for your chair, then why shouldn t you pay over and over again the man who made the glue for your chair, or the wood logger who cut the tree to make your chair, or the farmer who planted the tree, or the worm who dug the earth around the tree enriching the earth and allowing the water to reach the roots? You can go on forever: no one thing is created by one person. If a singer writes a song thats sold on CD, should he pay the person who invented the CD in the first place? Should we all, every day, pay Tim Berners-Lee a fee for inventing the internet? Should Tim pay his mum for giving him life so he could go on to create the internet? It is just ridiculous for one person or set of people to say that they are the creator of something and then hold sway over it if they have rights, then so does everyone else along the chain who allowed that final thing to be produced. Musicians couldnt sell their music today via the net without the work of generations of scientists and IT wizards .. the scientists created/produced a way for the musicians to distribute their work, and so the scientists are due a huge cut of everything the musicians make. If producers dont want people to duplicate things, then they shouldnt put them out in the public arena in the first place. If you stop people duplicating things, then where would the world be: wed stop people duplicating ideas, thoughts, reason, sense, compassion, love, whatever. Everything is copied and changed from biology to IT fundamental change is driven by incremental improvements. If producers dont want their work duplicated, then they should keep it to themselves. If that means they dont produce, then fine they can do something else with their lives. We all duplicate something: we repeat ideas, we come out with catchphrases, we retell jokes, we pay homage in the things we create to the things that have gone before us. Nothing is ever original. Should Matt Lucas get a fee every time someone quips Im the only gay in the village? Should Bono get paid every time someone mentions Bloody Sunday? Just because something is in paper, digital medium, fabric, etc it doesnt mean that it shouldnt be copied. If producers want to go on producing and making money, then they have to offer a distribution channel that is cheaper than copying which in terms of digital media must be possible. DRM is driven by the avaricious through supine incompetence.
