Subject:
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Orrin Hatch: Software Pirate?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Fri, 20 Jun 2003 04:28:00 GMT
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Viewed:
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178 times
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Orrin Hatch: Software Pirate?
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,59305,00.html
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) suggested Tuesday that people who download copyright
materials from the Internet should have their computers automatically destroyed.
But Hatch himself is using unlicensed software on his official website, which
presumably would qualify his computer to be smoked by the system he proposes.
The usual Republican “Do as we say, not as we do” thing. Hatch is one of these
jerks that is actually suggesting extreme remedies like it being okay, sans
judgement or even a court order, for a company to send someone a virus or
whatever and destroy their computer because they downloaded a possibly copyright
infringing piece of data.
I’ve commented on the deplorable state of the commons in U.S. law before, and
it’s not getting any better any time soon. What’s sad is that information
really does want to be free -- maybe not right away, but soon. I respect people
getting paid for their work, and so did the Founding Fathers when they gave an
IP right granting the exclusive use of an idea for 14 years.
Can you imagine Shakespeare not writing “Romeo and Juliet” because he couldn’t
get the rights to the material? Or how about Mallory not being able to settle a
deal with the estate of Chretien De Troyes and therefore forever barred from
writing his own “L’Morte D’Arthur.”
Do you see how it works? Art is not created in a vacuum -- which is why the
precise way you stack your bricks is bound to occur to someone else and
therefore no one has exclusive rights to the way bricks get stacked -- or at
least they shouldn’t. Thanks to our Patent Office, all kinds of kookie things
are being protected for some one patent holder that are more properly part of
the commons. If you read some Slashdot articles you will find that Amazon has
some particularly offensive patents on things that are actually very ordinary
web technologies. Why should these ideas belong to Amazon for their exclusive
use?
Where we are headed is somewhere that does hardly anyone any good, only a very
few are desirous of these nauseating extensions of IP rights but they have
enough money behind them to buy off the right people and keep their IP rights
creeping towards infinity.
How nice for Disney that they don’t have to pay someone for permission to use
ideas that they then tweak to their own grotesque commercial purposes: Snow
White, Cinderella, Robin Hood, Treasure Island (and Treasure Planet for that
matter!) -- to name but a few.
It really ticks me off.
The silver lining to the deplorable state of affairs is that the street has its
own uses for things. Hello P2P! Hello encryption! Hello anonymity!
When the street gets mad, it plays dirty.
-- Hop-Frog
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Message has 2 Replies:
 | | Re: Orrin Hatch: Software Pirate?
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| (...) What really has me confused about this whole thing is that Orrin Hatch a year ago called for a more flexible interpretation of the whole music copywrite laws so that file sharing would be allowed. I don't understand his flip-flop, and I (...) (22 years ago, 20-Jun-03, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, FTX)
| | | Re: Orrin Hatch: Software Pirate?
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| "richard marchetti" <blueofnoon@aol.com> wrote in message news:HGrJ2o.1H9o@lugnet.com... (...) the (...) at (...) things (...) of (...) has (...) ordinary (...) exclusive (...) I read an interesting slashdot article not too long ago about a (...) (22 years ago, 20-Jun-03, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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