Posted on 07/08/2009 5:53:17 PM PDT by FromLori
If you search for Elvis Presley in Wikipedia, you will find a lot of text and a few pictures that have been cleared for distribution. But you will find no music and no film clips, due to copyright restrictions. What we think of as our common cultural heritage is not “ours” at all.
This was never the intent. Copyright was meant to encourage culture, not restrict it. This is reason enough for reform. But the current regime has even more damaging effects. In order to uphold copyright laws, governments are beginning to restrict our right to communicate with each other in private, without being monitored. . If people start doing that, should we give the government the right to monitor all mail and all encrypted networks? Whenever there are ways of communicating in private, they will be used to share copyrighted material. If you want to stop people doing this, you must remove the right to communicate in private. There is no other option. Society has to make a choice.
The world is at a crossroads. The internet and new information technologies are so powerful that no matter what we do, society will change. But the direction has not been decided.
The technology could be used to create a Big Brother society beyond our nightmares, where governments and corporations monitor every detail of our lives. In the former East Germany, the government needed tens of thousands of employees to keep track of the citizens using typewriters, pencils and index cards. Today a computer can do the same thing a million times faster, at the push of a button. There are many politicians who want to push that button.
(Excerpt) Read more at ft.com ...
Yes property rights threaten us all.
Copyrights have to do with Intellectual Property rights. Intellectual capital and wealth creation, versus ‘docucommunism.’
Here’s a couple of alternative viewpoints.
Revenue-Sharing Deal for Royalties May Save Internet Radio
http://www.mediabuyerplanner.com/entry/43886/revenue-sharing-deal-for-royalties-may-save-internet-radio/
Information Just Wants To Be Paid
http://www.informationjustwantstobepaid.com/
I believe the implication is because of being monitored online. At least that is the light in which I viewed.
With the smelly one having a cyber czar, etc. and already listening into phone conversations more than the legal limit and given his propensity to become a fascist dictator I do not trust him. He wants the details secret why is that?
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/06/2148217
CALEA (keyword search here or on a search engine elsewhere) will tell you more than you want to know about the paranoid truthophobes monitoring and lurking already.
For our safety, of course.
That’s not to disparage all DHS and related people! There are noble people trying to use technology for good. (Paging Curt Weldon/ABLE DANGER.)
And for those heroes, it’s a shame they find themselves hamstrung by the ACLU and its ilk.
Never heard about that before thanks learn something new everyday.
A friend of mine just started having Karioke at his bar. He didnt know the rules I guess because soon after some group representing “artists came in and hit him up for $600 bucks to pay to use the songs on his Karioke machine.
omg seriously?? You are kidding right?
He got off cheap. I hear some getting hit up for $2000+
Ping for later.
Those of us who have worked in networking and telephony are well aware of CALEA, it’s uses, abuses, technical challenges and avoidance techniques.
Truth is, it is only really useful when:
Law enforcement has a SPECIFIC target (phone number)
The user does not wish to use counter measures
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