From: Marc Forrester (A1200@mharr.force9.co.uk)
Date: Fri Sep 01 2000 - 03:23:07 MDT
[Non-member submission]
Paul Hughes: Friday 01-Sep-00
> I don't know about you guys, but the recent trends among Corporate
> America to strengthen Intellectual Property Laws beyond the DMCA has
> got me very concerned and agitated. I'm all for seeing creators of
> intellectual property be compensated fairly for their work, but recent
> moves within our legal system are really starting to disturb me.
As an odd-jobbing programmer and personal computer tech, I have always
been uncomfortable with the status-quo attitude that software must be
crippled, controlled and constantly battled over in the courts, fair
use denied at every possible legalistic opportunity, and all customers
generally treated as criminals, sight unseen. It results Microsoft,
a company with any amount of capital wealth, but a flagship product
that took twenty years to reach the standard of the Alto. Compared to
the distributed wealth, in dollars, computrons and knowledge generated
by open source and shareware development, Silicon Valley can be looked
upon as a self-deluding digital third-world.
As a transhuman, and considering particularly my own future as a
partially or wholly digital mind, I must reject this market entirely.
I have no use for laws that would make me a criminal for remembering a
piece of music or talking to another mind.
Buskware (Street Performer Protocol) seems to me to have the best
long-term future. I will hereon waive all international copyright laws
WRT my own personal software creations, request that anyone who finds
them useful send me whatever the hell they feel like, and make the
information on exactly how much I receive and for what freely available.
If this meme progresses beyond the initial bottlenexk the economics are
simple, I get paid for useful work, and tippers get the improvements
they want from me, and more of the same kind of software from other
buskers.
http://www.boswa.com/buskware/buskware.html
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