Re: "My dad is a pirate."

[El Tux]

On Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:19:37 +0100, Alexander Terekhov wrote:

> El Tux wrote:
> 
> [... Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985) ...]
> 
> 
> Oh dear El Tux, that (1985) was long before December 16, 1997, when
> President Clinton signed HR 2265 -- the No Electronic Theft Act -- into
> law.

Dear Alexander, that doesn't matter in the least because we're
discussing concepts here, not legal definitions which, BTW, tend to
use common words in uncommon ways. The poster cited a USSC judge's
comment to support the *concept* that file-sharing is stealing, and I
quoted another to show that not all USSC judges share the same
view. Simple black-and-white cases rarely make it to the USSC so it's
commonplace for the justices to disagree with each other. One can find
a quote to support either side of just about anything that's been
brought before the Supreme Court.

As for the No Electronic Theft Act and the later DMCA, voters never
asked for either. Those were all but written by the music and movie
industries and rushed through by their pet politicians. I do not
believe these laws represent the will of the American people and
neither, apparently, do most of the American people. The rather high
percentage of the population that's engaged in file-sharing, the
surging sales in portable media players capable of holding ten times
more music than the average American buys in a lifetime, the high
demand for terabyte hard drives, and the strong demand for ever-faster
broadband all suggest that if we put it to the voters, they would
repeal the DMCA and NETA, explicitly legalize file-sharing, and
probably make some other long-needed changes in copyright law to
restore its original purpose of stimulating artistic and scientific
creativity.

If you want people to respect the law, then they must first be able to
respect the process that created it.