On Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:19:37 +0100, Alexander Terekhov wrote: > El Tux wrote: > > [... Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985) ...] > > > Oh dear El Tux, that (1985) was long before December 16, 1997, when > President Clinton signed HR 2265 -- the No Electronic Theft Act -- into > law.
Dear Alexander, that doesn't matter in the least because we're discussing concepts here, not legal definitions which, BTW, tend to use common words in uncommon ways. The poster cited a USSC judge's comment to support the *concept* that file-sharing is stealing, and I quoted another to show that not all USSC judges share the same view. Simple black-and-white cases rarely make it to the USSC so it's commonplace for the justices to disagree with each other. One can find a quote to support either side of just about anything that's been brought before the Supreme Court. As for the No Electronic Theft Act and the later DMCA, voters never asked for either. Those were all but written by the music and movie industries and rushed through by their pet politicians. I do not believe these laws represent the will of the American people and neither, apparently, do most of the American people. The rather high percentage of the population that's engaged in file-sharing, the surging sales in portable media players capable of holding ten times more music than the average American buys in a lifetime, the high demand for terabyte hard drives, and the strong demand for ever-faster broadband all suggest that if we put it to the voters, they would repeal the DMCA and NETA, explicitly legalize file-sharing, and probably make some other long-needed changes in copyright law to restore its original purpose of stimulating artistic and scientific creativity. If you want people to respect the law, then they must first be able to respect the process that created it. _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
