On 5/30/2000, Jeremy G. Byrne <jeremy[_at_]iz.org> wrote:
>
> On 27/05/2000, Kevin Grierson" <kgrierson[_at_]wilsav.com> wrote:
> >
> > Gnutella and Napster are giving us all the opportunity to steal,
> > and I guess we're finding out now how few honest men there really
> > are in our society today.
>
> The above comment is so gratuitously offensive, I feel compelled to
> respond in kind. (Forgive the indulgence!)
>
> Copyright's exploitation of entirely artificial scarcity is nothing
> less than economic censorship. Worse, the application of copyright
> amounts to appropriation from the commons -- theft from the public
> -- and those who uphold it and defend it are participating in a
> crime against civilisation (albeit one which will shortly become
> impossible to sustain). Copyright has no redeeming features, except
> perhaps its vulnerability to technological solutions.
>
> Of course, that's only the way I see it.
We'll just have to agree to disagree about whether copyright is unjust or immoral. My problem with Napster and Gnutella is that it allows anonymous violations of the law for personal gain.
If you want to violate a law as an act of civil disobedience because you believe the law to be immoral, fine. The essence of civil disobedience, however, is the violation of a law in a public way that draws attention to the law's injustice. There is no such public component to the use of gnutella, in particular. I submit that the reason people use gnutella is not to publically disobey an unjust law, but to violate the law anonymously for their own private benefit.
I also find your argument that copyright amounts to "appropriation from the commons" unconvincing (and ironic, given that the "tragedy of the commons" led to property rights in the first place). The works that are being copied were not in the commons to start with -- they were placed there by their creators, who had the option of not making them public, but chose to do so because of the protections afforded by copyright.
Kevin Grierson
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