Just so folks don't think I'm a wacko commie here's my perspective again - I believe copyright protection is a privelege granted by the Constitution and regulated by congress to the producers of scientific or artistic works. The founders did this to compensate those producers for their work and to foster innovation in whatever areas that had a need but to also allow original works to at some point be built upon. It is a privilege not a right, by definition, it has been granted by the public to those producers so that both parties would receive something of value. To me, the current copyright and patent laws only benefit the producers, or in the case of movies and music the distributors, leaving the public with an empty shell of a culture that essentially helped bring down the Berlin Wall. The Constitution stated a limited time for copyright, that has been warped the past 20 years by ever increasing lobbying and overly excessive copyright enforcement and penalties, those RIAA victims probably would have rather been arrested for stealing than copyright infringement.
Back to where we started - the Grokster ruling was vague and will only cause more lawsuits, tie up the courts and kill innovation. At least, in the US. Now for more coffee... On 7/7/05, Wayne Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > At 08:24 PM 7/6/2005, Winterlight typed: > >The only way the media industry are going to come out of this, is to > >change their thinking, and come up with new ways to market old products. > > There was a little local coffee shop that use to play audio CDs that she > had purchased when a RIAA representative counted all the chairs while I was > there & told the owner that she would have to pay $XXX.00 weekly to > continue to playing the cds publicly in her coffee shop. She commented that > it wasn't publicly since it was her little coffee shop & that the price > they commanded would bankrupt her. She immediately stopped playing the cds > that she had purchased & stopped buying cds entirely. From then on she only > played the radio. Many of her clients had heard her cds & had gone out to > buy their own copies but the RIAA representative didn't care about that > when she brought up that fact. She complained that the price they wanted > was more expensive than if she had bought each chair a cd. We all know that > not every chair was filled from opening to close as well but I doubt the > RIAA representative took that into effect either. > > It's strong arm tactics like these that many people see that give them the > feeling that it's ok to steal something from these guys. Believe me the > coffee shop owner told everyone why she was no longer playing audio cds any > more & then she had a sign made up that anyone could read as to why & there > was nothing the RIAA could do about her putting that sign up in her shop > because it was 100% the truth. > > > ----------+---------- > Wayne D. Johnson > Ashland, OH, USA 44805 > <http://www.wavijo.com> > > -- -jmg Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit. Henry Brooks Adams [1838-1918]
