Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Well, if you think about it, that is very common. You can pay to see cable TV, but you cannot rebroadcast a program, share it with other households, nor charge people to come to your house to see it.
You can buy a car, but you are restricted to traffic laws and speed limits.
You can buy Windows software, but you cannot copy it and sell it to someone else.
Most people understand these implicit rules as a requirement of owning that product, and if they are happy with the product, they accept (most of) those requirements. Call that "corporate fascism" if you will, but the fact is that it is not anything out-of-the-ordinary, and no reason to attack e-books, say, unless you plan to unilaterally attack the whole capitalist system.
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Actually Steve, your examples are not examples of Corporate Fascism but rather are examples of the applications of laws (Well, with a limited exception of windows which I will get to).
Traffic Laws are set by the government. Ford, GM and Toyota have no stake at all in how you use their cars as long as you buy from them. I can buy a Toyota Camry and take it to the drag strip; it might void my warranty but Toyota isn't going to do anything to stop me.
Corporations might post warnings about how you cannot rebroadcast their Television program, but ultimately, they don't stop you from making fair use of the product (though they have tried, the courts have stopped them).
Again, Windows limitation about selling copies of your copy to others, is just them defending their copyright. Now, where it does start becoming Corporate Fascism is how they tell you how many computers it can be installed upon.
Now, DRM takes things a step further. Copyright law represents the fact that the author of a work does not have unconditional ownership of it. Indeed, it is based on the notion that that the natural state of information is in the public domain. Copyright is ultimately the granting, by the state, of a limited license to the author in order to encourage the author to place his creative work into the public domain. This license allows the author to place certain conditions on the use of their work (such as no duplication of the work for profit), but it is a limited. For example, if someone buys a novel, the author cannot tell them they are only allowed to read it once, or that they cannot lend or sell their copy to another person. DRM is an attempt by publishers and other media producers to extend the bounds of this license in such a way that they can indeed tell someone they can only read a book once or lend a movie to a friend. Thats why I consider it corporate fascism.
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Bill