> By enforcing their copyrights more harshly, recording and publishing > companies will eventually destroy themselves.
Agreed. But the question becomes, will it happen before or after the freedoms of the Internet are also destroyed? The politics game is generally balanced: if you can't get the courts to give you the interpretation you want, you go for the legislature. If you can't get the legislature to pass the laws you want, you get the President not to sign their laws anymore. If you can't get the President to go veto crazy, you get the judges to interpret them your way, and so on. If you can't get anybody to go along with you, you're either crazy or going about it the wrong way. What court cases like this tell us is that we shouldn't focus on the courts. The old laws favor the content industry. We require new laws, and new laws require new norms. Norms come very, very slowly. People don't change their behavior quickly, but they can be influenced to change their behavior in times of transition. That's what the court battle is trying to ensure, that people stick with the old system as much as possible as the Internet matures. We have to fight against that in another arena. By providing easy ways to share content that's legal NOW and convincing people it's a good thing, we can change their behavior, and when the law comes into contact with that behavior, laws will change. Here's the catch: It requires solutions people can accept right now. It took years to get gay rights issues out in the open. Most people don't care, because most people aren't gay. Similarly, most people aren't content creators. But the Internet increasingly allows that, and the more people are encouraged to create, and the more they run into problems doing what they want to do, the more their norms will change. // Matt _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
