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Simon Waters wrote:
if cd's both music and software were not such a rip off then piracy would not be a problemRMS would have us note that piracy tended to involve stealing things on the high seas, and a lot of killing people, and isn't much like "copyright infringement", but then RMS is careful in his choice of words.
Considering the way record contracts work quite a few artists might find being subjected to armed robbery on the high seas preferable.
I make an effort to respect copyright, it is the law, and my objections to this legislation is not that it makes copyright infringement harder (certainly not on commob Digital media), but that it is likely to make it harder to work on Linux readers for new (or bastardised) media formats. If Adobe have used encryption or other technology to restrict access to a documents content, this effectively make it illegal to make interoperable programs. As a law it contradicts the interoperability, and reverse engineering rights already under European, and UK law. Now it may well be the case that these rights are found to be more important than Copyright law, but I don't want to be the test case....
The basic problem is that copyright is a legal fiction originally invented to control the then new technology of the printing press. In its first incarnation a right given by the state to copy books, hence the name. From this the business model of publishing came into existance. Copyright was later revised as a right attributed to authors, something which the publishing industry didn't like. To the point that whilst copyright is nominally an author's right many copyrights (especially for music, film and video) are actually held by publishers. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.