[p2p-research] Fwd: [fcforum] Fw: iPad DRM is a dangerous step backward. Sign the petition!

[M. Fioretti]

On Wed, Feb 03, 2010 13:22:42 PM -0500, Ryan Lanham (rlanham1963 at gmail.com) wrote:
  
> IP doesn't block free and open.  It blocks theft.  You say it isn't
> theft.  The world disagrees with you. So do I.  "Artificial
> scarcity" is as absurd as communal property.  I always think of the
> wonderful scene in Dr. Zhivago where he walks into his own house
> after the war to find the more "just" solution of everyone living in
> it.  People have rights.  One of those rights is the right to own
> their own ideas.

Ryan,

I understand (I think) what you are saying above and boy, do I agree!,
but with a suggestion. I find it much simpler and robust, so to speak,
to substitute "ideas" with "time" in your last sentence above.

It cuts all the "marginal cost of copies is zero", "information wants
to be free" "scarcity is artificial" etc... slogans down to something
much more concrete. My own TIME is only mine and is sure as hell a
really limited resource.

If it takes me, say, five full days to research and test stuff in
order to write something that gives one million people emotions
(e.g. poetry) or, much more prosaically, teaches them in twenty
minutes how to do something they need to do, I may only be able to
afford to do it if there is some guarantee that I can make enough of
it to at least pay my expenses for those same days. If there are no
such guarantee (because there is no protection at all of that time
investment, ignoring for a moment how it is legally called) I won't
cry from the rooftops. I'll simply spend that same time teaching
privately in some school or course for people who can afford a good
live teacher. But in that case, since time is damn scarce, I will NOT
have any TIME left to do the other thing, even if that could have been
useful to many more people by publishing it online

> It is antithetical to the commons to be compelled to participate in it.

Very well said, again. When I talk with FOSS zealots, I often point
out that "I can't say people with a straight face that in order to be
Free as in Freedom they HAVE to use only the software that *I* call
Free"
	  	      Marco
-- 
What REALLY scares the executives of music and movie corporations:
http://stop.zona-m.net/node/88