the time has come for this matter to be settled in the courts. the right of an individual to lend copyrighted material for no profit has been an integral part of copyright law for ever, or at least for as long as copyright law has existed here in america. that technology has continuously made the distribution and reproduction of such material easier doesn’t alter the law's basic thrust. any change in this philosophy would have far reaching consequences, well beyond p2p's themselves. think libraries, think radio stations (those profit making entities alone allow copying on massive scales). think reading aloud.
i don't relish getting dragged into court by by greedy shortsighted recording artists and their riaa weasels, but if it means re-establishing once and for all the rights we now take for granted, i'll consider it a fair trade.
- js.
“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lites his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement, or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.”
- Thomas Jefferson, the first U.S. Patent Commissioner - 1813.
|