Quote:
Originally Posted by Daithi
Or better yet, when England made it against the law for starving peasants to hunt in the King's forest Robin Hood was born. Maybe, just maybe, it's time for a modern day Robin Hood who steals intellectual property from the governments and corporations and gives it back to the people. <-- Sorry, I was on roll and may have taken it a little too far.
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I believe you've just described Demonoid.
Doctorow's recent speech about "
The coming war on general computing" points out that part of the reason copyright law is so tangled and and messed-up, especially internationally agreements, is that copyright is
just not important to a large sector of the world.
When countries choose delegates to send to the United Nations, the choose water experts. Agriculture experts. Health experts. Not copyright experts... because "pay the registered creator of the patent for the stop-valve in your hydroelectric pumps" is just not a big concern when you're trying to stop a flood from destroying next year's food for the entire region. Because "track down who wrote the original version of the children's book that eight schools have photocopied to use to teach kids to read," again, doesn't matter as much as spreading literacy in low-income districts.
Copyright is a first-world problem. It's a contract made among people of means, with the premise that everyone involved can afford monopolies on information. And inasmuch as it's being used to stall progress in developing areas and support oppression of the poor, the "Robin Hood" approach is very reasonable.
Where the Robin Hood approaches are being used to evade payment by those who can afford it... I'm still not convinced that it does any measurable harm. If the "starving student who always borrowed books from friends" has become the "starving student who downloads books from torrent sites"... what have we lost, as a society?
The loss is if people who formerly paid, have now stopped. And we're not seeing any signs of that.