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@Ralph: How 'bout this analogy: Instead of money falling down into the crowd, a single person holding the money walks among the crowd, and hands a dollar to anyone who wants one, fairly and orderly? It doesn't have to be chaotic, unfair, or suppressive (unless the people decide to riot, beat up the money-holder, and grab the money from them...)
Look, I understand all of your concerns. Everyone wants to protect what's theirs, including conceptual "things" like privacy and security. No one wants to feel like they are being oppressed. I'd like to point out again that, to an extent, most of us have already given up the very things we are afraid of losing now, to our present retailers, bankers, ISPs, phone companies, etc... and that we are not now locked in our homes, so fearful of who's watching us that we can't function in the real world.
Nobody likes to have to be regulated. I wish the world didn't need a single regulation. But in the interest of fairness, safety, and cooperation, regulations can be a useful thing... a traffic light at a busy intersection, as opposed to the alternative 30-car pileup every other morning, or the (apparently powerful and pervasive) fear that a fellow motorist, or more to the point, a government cipher, will just blow up your car as you pass.
Regulating the web would be one more brick in the pile... and yes, it's already a big pile... but it's also a pile we're already used to, and if done properly (and I maintain that it can be done properly), it doesn't have to collapse the entire pile and doom us all to Hell with the addition of this one brick.
Anyway, I have no more to say about regulation in this thread... I don't think I can clarify my position any further. (You're welcome.)
We still have the issue of the thread, though, which hasn't been answered to anyone's satisfaction: Authors have a concern about their copyrights and protection of same (justified or not, but there nonetheless). Can e-publishing do anything to alleviate that concern, and thereby open and improve the e-publishing market, which is the point of the thing after all?
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