Quote:
Originally posted by Gallaine
I find it interesting that most people who object to copy protection insist that their "rights" are being violated. I won't state my own position. Rather, I will ask a few questions: What "rights" do you feel are being violated, why do you think you have those rights, and from where do you believe they originate? Don't pop off a quick reply. Think about it. |
Thanks sincerely for your fatherly attempt to place parochial restrictions on the speed of my speculative thought.
I'll "pop off" a reply as rapidly as you have combined thoughtless gravity with muddy parallelism, thank you very much. Excessive chin-stroking is a mannerism, not an indication of the possible depth of your speculations.
Your first mistake is in presuming that consumers' rights constitute something abstract, absolute and remote -- like the Platonic world, for example, or heaven, or the possible immortality of the soul. Whereas the right to private ownership is specific and constitutional. For instance: Early legal disputes focused primarilty on land. Land is not an absolute, it is a fixed commodity, the ownership of which is subject to laws. Same thing with sound recordings: The lessening of music owners' rights (not "violation" -- that is your ad hominem phrase, not mine) comes from an extension of the idea of intellectual property, which was created to protect artists' ideas but is now being extended to encompass individual *copies* of ideas that were bought (not rented, not borrowed) by the consumer.
If you're going to blame someone for the vagary of this interpretation of legal property, then blame record company lawyers for advancing the idea that one borrows rather than owns a thing even if one purchases it legally. The conflation of abstract and concrete ownership is a result of lawyers' shoddy thinking, not mine or that of anyone else who has posted on this thread.
Quote:
| We often feel we have rights but don't often take the time to think about what they are and why we have them. |
1. We often resort to ad hominem when we presume to speak for others (which is what you just did). 2. Your logical fallacy is here: (to paraphrase) "Our mistake is in feeling we have rights . . . but not knowing we have them." Your original point was that you felt we didn't necessarily have these rights at all, that they were too vague to actually exist. Yet now you say we actually have these rights. Which is it?
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| Here are a few other questions to help stimulate thought and discussion. Suppose that I own an item that you want. Further suppose that I offer to sell it you. What rights do I have as a seller and you as a buyer? How are those rights decided and protected? Do I have the right as the owner of the item to place *any* price I want on it? Can I as owner offer to sell it to you with some restrictions - such as, you cannot make a copy of it for any reason? If not, why not? |
Your example doesn't apply to the discussion, which is not about record companies wanting to sell us a copy-protected CD. It is about their attempt to make it illegal for anyone else to sell anything else. If you'd paid attention to what I said before, you'd have noticed the distinction.
Your mistake is in presuming that the violation occurs at the *seller's* level, whereas the violation I've been objecting to occurs at the *legislative* level. The problem is not that EMI wants to implement copy protection, since we as buyers are at liberty to decide whether or not to purchase from them. The problem is that the legal machinations of EMI, et al., are resulting in a redefinition of the rights of *all* musical property, including those of musicians not affiliated with EMI, those of other record companies that do not chooose to implement copy protection and those of the inventors of other recordig technologies.
The mania to control is responsible for other transgressions in the name of the principle of intellectual property, such as the genetic engineering of single-crop foods to prevent people from planting seeds.
To reiterate: I am against EMI not because they are attempting to implement copy protection but because they are attempting to make copy protection de rigeur for everyone. This is already having its effect on the technology of personal recorders.
The presumption is that, because a machine is capable of recording material from a copy protected disk, its recording capability ought to be crippled. Thus, even a company that wishes to research and market such a device for musicians to use to record their own music faces legal opposition.
Until recently, our rights as consumers have been specific and concrete. But the apparently abstract issues of the digital age have allowed lawyers and lobbyists to make the specific vague and so to attach to that issue the very ill-reasoned indignation of which Gallaine has accused "people" on this thread.
Had I objected to EMI's right to sell copy-protected CDs, then Joe Blogg's comment might have borne relevance to the issue we were discussing as well. If my complaint were that simple, I'd gladly defer. But what we're really discussing is our right to buy uncopyrighted music from *other labels*, as well as uncrippled digital recording devices and anything else that allows us to modify in any way a thing that we *already own*.
Ask yourself these simple questions, if you like: If I buy a drawing and am asked by the artist not to make a xerox copy, am I legally bound not to do so? Is there a difference between my making a copy for my personal files and making a copy to sell to someone else? If I choose to hang a copy of a painting on the wall and keep the original in a safe, should I be subject to legal action even though I own that painting? If the artist creates a kind of paint that cannot be photographed, is s/he not chipping away at my rights of ownership generally by attempting to make it illegal for any artist to use any other kind of paint?
