On Tuesday 24 May 2005 23:17, Gil Freund wrote: > > However, regardless of the intention of the original copyrights law, > > which were formed during a time where technology was considerably less > > capable of easily copying and distributing a copyrighted (or PD for that > > matter) material than it is today: > > > > do you think it is desirable to enforce a law that prevents people from > > ripping a CD/eBook/DVD/whatever and sharing it online? Do you think it > > would be practical? Do you think that it is a crime to do that? > > > > Technology advances, and law and philosophy must advance with it. > > Killing a person with a knife is messy, difficult and dangerous to the > killer. Killing a person with sniper from 250m is easier, cleaner and > less dangerous to the killer. > Should the law (and our philosophy) change in respect to murder?
To continue your analogy - the law forbidding murder wasn't passed to give gun-makers a fourteen-year monopoly on murdering people with antique rifles because the only tool available to the general populace many centuries ago, a knife, was indeed too messy and inefficient. And today, despite the advancement of technology, killing one person doesn't help me kill the next one at zero cost, even though I'm quite willing for the dead bodies to be identical, bit-wise. In other words: this comparison has no basis whatsoever... Copyright law wasn't passed to protect an ethical right. (That's what the 'spiritual rights' part of the Israeli (and British etc) 'Authors' Rights' law is for.) It was passed to enable an economic model based on a distribution monopoly, because it was beneficial given the technology at the time. -- Dan Armak Gentoo Linux developer (KDE) Public GPG key: http://dev.gentoo.org/~danarmak/danarmak-gpg-public.key Fingerprint: DD70 DBF9 E3D4 6CB9 2FDD 0069 508D 9143 8D5F 8951
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