[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by HarryT

An author's income from his work forms his "estate". Suppose an author is married, and dies; is there really anything wrong with their wife/husband and children being able to continue receiving income from the sale of the author's books? If the person had bought shares in a company, they could be passed on in the author's will (and shares are just as "ephemeral" as "rights" to a book). Why single out "intellectual" work as not been permitted to benefit the dependents of the author? It just seems wholy unreasonable to me.

seriously, read the article by Flint. he says it much better than i can.

OK, I've looked at it. They may be "technically" a political party, but they aren't REALLY one - they're a single-issue pressure group. They have no policy whatsoever on taxation, defence, education, health, or any other issue that's necessary to run a country. It would be highly irresponsible to want such a pressure group to come to power, IMHO. Do you really think that they are capable of running a country?

yes, they are are a single-issue group. they don't claim to be anything else. and it doesn't matter whether they are capable of running a country, because that is not in fact their goal : they simply want to gain enough seats in parliament to be able to make a alliance with whatever party is running the country, on the basis that if the party in power supports their stand on copyright, they will support the party's stand on other issues.

Do you think that the government should do it instead? The whole point of laws is that they are monitored and enforced centrally. As things stand, if I, as an author, find one of my books illegally offered for upload on a BT site, I have absolutely no "power" to discover who it is that's committing the crime. Surely my rights to prosecute a criminal should be considered more important than protecting the "anonymity" of the criminal, shouldn't they? As things stand, these criminals are virtually immune from being tracked down, and they know it!

again, nobody has any business monitering my traffic just in case i might be uploading a book to The Darknet. my privacy is important to me, and i don't want it compromised, and ESPECIALLY not for such issues as potential copyright infringement, since i also have not seen ANY evidence supporting the alarmist proclamations that The Darknet will kill all creation. in fact, the (completely empiric, granted, but nonetheless ONLY) evidence i have seen, would tend to prove the opposite.

this is of course a whole separate issue, but i'm sorry, there is no convincing evidence that The Darknet is that much of a threat (or possibly, any threat at all). have musicians completely disappeared ? stopped making music, because people were sharing too many mp3s ? no. have the authors whose works are freely available for sale in digital format noticed their sales plummetting because someone might have uploaded one ? no.

it certainly is not a sufficient justification for my privacy as an individual to be undermined, and my private life ransacked.