Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Marijuana is like piracy

I'm very concerned that the War over Copyright is going to turn into another War on Drugs.  Or rather, that it already has.  Meaning, a decades long struggle to prohibit something that people are definitely going to do, anyway, and infringing on the freedoms of every American in the process.

2 comments:

  1. Ha!

    I wrote this last year - figured I post it here just to share:

    07/13/11 11:00

    I am not usually pessimistic. But I can see how the government's War on File
    Sharing will continue down the same path as the War on Drugs.

    The two are very similar in terms of ignorance of reality, twisted philosophy
    and general hypocrisy.

    The War on Drugs has cost billions of dollars, ruined millions of lives and
    contributed to severe erosion of Constitutional liberty and loss of respect for
    government and the police.

    It's also turned drug production and sales into a hugely profitable business and
    then turned that business over to terrorist cartels and warlords.

    Given that, it doesn't take a large stretch of the imagination to see the War on
    File Sharing turning into an amazing bonanza for a few special interests,
    further limiting the rights of "normal" citizens and pushing large portions of
    the tech and innovation industries onto foreign shores.

    What is deeply frustrating about all this is that the solution is rather simple.

    The entertainment industry does not have a "right" to make money from any
    particular technology.

    If they are losing the amount of money that they claim, then the simple answer
    is to abandon the technologies that are costing them money.

    Stop releasing digital content!

    Then it can't be pirated.

    Restrict all movies to theaters, all music to live performances and low-quality
    FM broadcasts.

    Problem solved.

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