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[FYI] A Love Song For Napster
- To: debate@fitug.de
- Subject: [FYI] A Love Song For Napster
- From: Kristian Köhntopp <kris@koehntopp.de>
- Date: Mon, 05 Feb 2001 20:26:58 +0100
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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