On Monday 02 May 2005 16:05, Craig White wrote:
  

On Mon, 2005-05-02 at 15:22 -0700, Bryan.ONeal@asu.edu wrote:
    

Not to rehash the intellectual property arguments, but I want to kill the
abusive #@!*%($# my wife is unfortunate enough to work with, but I have
been 'educated' that this is 'wrong' and 'illegal'.  Are you saying I
should just say "Umm, I think it is too fucking bad" and skin them while
they sleep anyway?

Laws are designed to encourage behavior that is healthy for our society
and discourage behavior that is unhealthy for our society.  Laws that
make it possible to protect your creation from abuse is good, forcing
these laws on content providers who do not wish to protect their
creations is bad.  Creating public fear instead of education is also bad.
 But again, if you purchase a house that has a clear stipulation that the
original architect has finale say on any modifications, then you do not
have the rite to modify your house without his/her approval.  But you do
have the rite not to buy the house.

[Please remember I believe in fair use, and I believe the RIAA goes to
far]
      

----
We are gotten so far afield that I have wondered whether any opinion
that I may have is worth posting and to that extent, I will limit my
opinion.

Apparently, there is a notion of a restricted rights on what you
purchase thereby making it unclear that what you have purchased is yours
to do as you please. I simply denounce that as unworkable.

I am content, feel empowered to view any dvd that I have purchased on
any player mechanism that I have purchased and if to accomplish this
task, I have to implement some code that some court deems this code to
be illegal, I am ready to suffer the consequences. Of course there
cannot be consequences so the issue is absurd. Any political entity or
corporation that seeks to prevent me from doing so would prove its
hostility and suffer consequences far greater than I.

This notion of purchasing license for use in severely limited form is
perverse and endemic. Where I can - such as computer software, the open
source alternatives are so obviously the only true options that a user
such as myself has. This however enjoys no half-way measures. It makes
little sense to justify running openoffice.org or mozilla on a Macintosh
or Windows machine as you cannot get beyond the hostile, restricted use
licensing merely by looking the other way.

Yes, we are a nation of laws and the laws are written by the politicians
we elect. The process has become entirely subjugated by the two parties
which have finagled the laws to entrench themselves. The people of this
country have become indifferent and hasn't become pissed off enough to
fix the problem. Thus we have the moneyed interests - corporations,
deciding the politics and hence the laws. This is why we have such poor
choices as candidates, stupid laws such as DMCA, etc.

Craig

    

 This may just be fat for the fire, but I recall a couple things from my old 
CB days that might be something of a precedent here:
 The FCC allows a person the right to receive and interpret any given  
transmission on their personal equipment no matter what the source, provided 
that the information so received is not rebroadcast, (or used for illegal 
purposes). This is part of the contorversy behind radar detectors, which are 
nothing more than legal receivers designed to pick up the radio signal 
broadcast by a police radar transmitter. Attempts by law enforcement agencies 
to confiscate them and thwart their use are just as illegal as the attempts 
by drivers to use them to facilitate speeding. The question is, can a person 
be denied the right to know that they are being bombarded with microwave 
radiation so a cop can make his quota?
 I also remember the Record Industry running a campaign many years ago against 
people making "illegal" recordings of their favorite songs broadcast on the 
radio. The rumor at the time was that cassette recorders were going to be 
made illegal because of that! Now, I hear rumors that computer Video Capture 
devices are going to be made illegal as of this June for the same reason.
 Also, Re: Jury Nullification and civil disobedience - I was one of the few 
during the big CB Boom that bothered to get a CB license (KBF 0253). Within a 
year, the FCC abandoned the CB license law as unenforceable, and dropped the 
requirement altogether due to the overwhelming number of "illegal" CB radios 
in use at the time. What is the point or purpose of a law that cannot be 
fairly and practically enforced?
 I'm not trying to cloud the issue, I just thought I'd cite a couple similar 
situations from the past.
  Stu
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