Re: INFO/NYT: Copyright Was a Quaint Idea In Its Time

     The New York Times has an interesting article with the inaccurate title: "The Concept of Copyright Fights for Internet Survival" http://www.nyt.com/library/tech/00/05/biztech/articles/10digital.html (Registration required.) "While American courts struggle over the recording industry's challenge to digital music swapping, Ian Clarke, a 23-year-old Irish programmer, is moving on to the next battleground. He is finishing a program that he says will make it impossible to control the traffic in any kind of digital information -- whether it is music, video, text or software." (The Freenet website is at http://freenet.sourceforge.net/ -- Napster is small potatoes...)

     I say that the headline is inaccurate because Copyright is not threatened at all -- only the methods that Copyright has been enforced are being made irrelevant. It still remains in society's interest -- and therefore ultimately in the interest of individuals -- to compensate people for being creative. If it is impossible to stop people from acquiring any information that they want then we need to make it so easy -- and self-evidently a good idea -- to pay for it that essentially everyone pays for most of their information use most of the time. Respecting someones copyright is like saying Thank you -- and polite people say Thank you most of the time that they receive something of value.

     Sincerely,
     Christopher

Christopher Gwyn
<christopher[_at_]icopyright.com> Received on Thu May 11 2000 - 01:01:51 GMT