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[FYI] A Love Song For Napster




http://www.discover.com/feb_01/gthere.html?article=featnapster.html


...
  The logic of the situation compelled authorizers to intervene in
private
  as well as commercial communications. These new middlemen became
  arbiters of how much citizens should pay when they shared information
  with one another. There was no rational means of setting such prices,
  because the scarcity of the product was artificially created and
  government-imposed. Fifteen years later, we can now see that when
  the courts killed Napster, they unwittingly set us on a road that
ended
  in a massive government-sponsored protection racket. 


  So that's my thought experiment- bleak and alarmist, perhaps, but one
  that follows directly from the logic of this situation. If we make
  Napster-like free file sharing illegal, we'll have to rid ourselves of
  either computers or democracy. You can't have both. And the issues
  raised by Napster aren't going away. They are going to rise up again
  and again until our society makes some difficult decisions and
  adjustments. 
...
-- 
	http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/wishlist/18E5SVQ5HJZXG