( a real student speaks) Does File Trading Fund Terrorism?

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Alexandros Papadopoulos <apapadop () cmu edu>
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2003 14:30:56 -0500
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Re: [IP] Does File Trading Fund Terrorism?

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On Friday 14 March 2003 09:51, Dave Farber wrote:
> ------ Forwarded Message
> From: Mary Shaw <mary.shaw () cs cmu edu>
> Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2003 09:48:15 -0500
> To: dave () farber net
> Subject: Re: [IP] Does File Trading Fund Terrorism?
>
> OK, let's throw some college kid in the slammer for 33 months (where
> on earth did that number come from) for stealing a few hundred
> dollars worth of DVDs.  But only if we throw the Enron execs and
> their confederates in Andersen in the same slammer for proportionally
> long sentences -- that would be about 33 billion months, wouldn't it?
>
> Have we lost all sense of proportion?
>
> [ yes we have  -- in more ways than one djf]

I'm glad to see many appalled by this kind of cowboy-politics, but would
nevertheless like to note an important point people usually don't pay
heed to:

A student participating in file swapping is not "stealing" DVDs. Calling
file swapping "stealing" relies on the premise that the student would
shell out the $$$ to buy the DVD, if the material was not available for
free. This is a big assumption, usually not true.

To draw a parallelism to this, I occasionally read the newspapers my
father buys, but I wouldn't buy one of my own. So, am I a "pirate" for
not buying a copy of my own and reading his newspapers [0]? Or is it
socially acceptable to share other kinds of information, but not DVDs
and music, because, errr... yes. [1] Ah, here Valenti and his gang are
talking about "intellectual property", which is as ludicrous as their
efforts to connect file sharing with the terrorism propaganda. [2]

Since when is this society geared towards extracting as much consumer
surplus possible for $MEGACORP, and not towards educating, entertaining
and generally raising the standard of living for the general
population?

- -A

[0] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

[1] Of course they will say that this hurts their business. But what's
most important, the benefit of society, or a couple billion $$$ more
for $MEGACORP?

[2] If they had any shame/decency in them, they wouldn't dare talk about
"intellectual property". This is just a propaganda term, which tries to
make people feel they're ripping an artist off when they copy a DVD.
This is totally untrue. See
http://dir.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/index.html for a
practical approach on the matter.

- -- 
http://andrew.cmu.edu/~apapadop/pub_key.asc
3DAD 8435 DB52 F17B 640F  D78C 8260 0CC1 0B75 8265
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