begin quoting Wade Curry as of Fri, Oct 07, 2005 at 10:17:12PM -0700: [snip] > The marketplace is generally ignorant of the encroachment on their > rights to the point of supporting it in many cases. Even if that
Well, there is that. > were not the case, it seems to me that our culture is full of > people who are addicted to their entertainment. I'm just ...which puts those to pander to their addiction in the same class a drug dealers, does it not? > pessimistic that this course of action will really gain the desired > goal, I guess. Well, there's the catch. Desired by _whom_? Obviously, if the market is complicit in the destruction of their freedoms, then the only reasonable conclusion is that the market does not value those freedoms. History is full of people making stupid decisions. > Being an idealist, I'd really rather not buy copy-protected works > myself. How can you really tell, though, whether or not something > is copy protected in the store (or on the web site)? Well, this is where it does make sense to push for legislation. All copy-protected systems ought to come with a prominent warning label indicating this fact. After all, we put warning labels about just about everything already, what's one more? > I don't buy a > whole lot of CDs and DVDs. Maybe it's obvious, but the ones I've > bought recently didn't mention copy protection on the packaging. Well, if it's a CD, there's no copy-protection. Rather, if there's copy-protection, it's no longer a CD, but just a five-inch disc that LOOKS like a CD. DVDs, on the other hand, come with copy-protection built in to the format. (Trivially defeatable, by all accounts... but _there_.) Perhaps the best approach to fight copy-protection is to pass a law that the vendor *must* replace, at *no* cost to the end user, any worn-out or damaged media that was copy-protected. After all, it's the responsbility of the user to keep backups, and if the vendor precludes this, the vendor should bear the full cost of replacing worn or damaged media. Don't worry about making this or that fair-use, or worry about making circumvention illegal. Simply make copyright owners of copy-protected works financially responsible for preventing the user from adequately protecting their (the user's) data. Of course, if you can't or won't replace worn or damaged media, the work in question should simply pass into the public domain. -Stewart "It's only fair." Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
