On Thu, Oct 23, 2003 at 10:43:22PM -0700, Tim May wrote:
TM: the last two paragraphs were of course added by me. But the point is still valid, that much of Hollywood's claims about "illegal listening" are not really any different from "reading without buying" books and magazines in libraries. The more urgent issue is this crap
Not to mention all the CDs and movies available in libraries. What's the
difference in borrowing CDs from a library and taking them home and taping or
mp3ing them and getting them from the net?
None, and in fact I have made my own DAT and CD copies of many hundreds of CDs I borrowed.
I also burn an average one DVD per day, of movies and suchlike.
about corporations buying time in public schools. If I had a kid in a
school and it was proposed that Nike, Time-Warner, Coke, or Intel would
be buying teaching time, I'd tell them to stop it pretty fucking quick
or face the Mother of All Columbines.
Or even worse the practice of Coke, Pepsi, et al paying money to the school
for exclusive rights to market their product. Also sort of like what M$ did in
schools and colleges -- gave them some free computers on the condition that all
competing software be removed from computer labs. Not surprising at all that
megacorps now want to buy teaching time in schools. In Japan the megacorp have
long run their own schools for workers kids to ensure the loyalty of their
future workers.
This last point I have no problem with, provided Megacorp pays all the costs for its own schools. In fact, I support bringing back indentured servitude.
The problem is when a "public school," which taxpayers have been ordered to pay for, becomes the fiefdom of a corporation. If a child is compelled to attend school, as he is, he may not be compelled to watch commercials or listen to corporate pitches.
--Tim May
"Dogs can't conceive of a group of cats without an alpha cat." --David Honig, on the Cypherpunks list, 2001-11
