Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
I'm well aware of what the expression means. ["Information wants to be free."] My point is that, while it's a pithy sound bite, the concept is not necessarily correct. The desire of certain people to access digital content at zero cost does not invalidate copyright law.
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No, wait ----- the concept is surely correct: all kinds of information spreads wildly: memes, rumors, books, videos, news. Information wants to be free, all right, if it's information anyone is interested in. Information is like steam escaping from a teakettle; it's hard to stop it.
No, this doesn't invalidate copyright law, but it does make it irrelevant. It took me a little over an hour to acquire a rather nice OCR-ed copy of "Atlas Shrugged" quite free for my laptop, and adjust the type size to my liking. I am persuaded from reading these posts that most of you here could have done this in half the time or less! If you wanted to.
So that's going to be an issue for Amazon, Sony, and copyright holders. This is big, kiddoes, e-books are huge. Gutenberg just moved sideways to a new platform, and we are here.
Twenty-seven years ago I typed in a phrase on a keyboard on this little Kaypro box thingie, and hit a typo, and backspaced it out --- and dropped my hands and gasped. I knew the world had changed forever, a lot. I'm having the same feeling again; the world just made a big lurch forward in content availability, and there will be a lot of people rolled over if they don't watch out.