Re: Stallman calls for an end to file sharing war

[David Kastrup]

Hadron<hadronquark@gmail.com> writes:

> David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> Alexander Terekhov <terekhov@web.de> writes:
>>
>>> Tim Smith wrote:
>>> [...]
>>>> Digital music, computers, and the internet have changed that. First of
>>>> all, copying is fast and easy. 
>>>
>>> Since shoplifting in a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermarket is
>>> certainly faster and easier than stealing in the pre-supermarket era,
>>> why not go 'total communist' and make food and household merchandise
>>> free as well?
>>
>> When you can do shoplifting in the privacy of your home, we'll be at a
>> comparable situation.  When I buy fruit in a supermarket, nobody would
>> think of installing surveillance cameras on my ground in order to make
>> sure that I don't plant the seeds of the fruits I buy (actually,
>> companies like Monsanto did take samples on private property
>> <URL:http://www.percyschmeiser.com/conflict.htm> and would likely have
>> succeeded even in Supreme Court if there had been any indication that
>> the farmer in question had actually sprayed his fields with the killer
>> herbicide Roundup after getting his seed culture contaminated with
>> Monsanto's Roundup resilient seeds).
>>
>> But Sony, for example, installed root kits on the computers of people
>> who bought music CDs from them in order to make sure that they would not
>> try copying the CDs.
>
> It takes a special kind of idiot to equate planting seeds from mother
> nature to copying someones hard work and potentially distributing it for
> free.

Well, Monsanto did that, and even the Supreme Court in Canada did not
overturn that part of their reasoning.

We are living in a special kind of idiotic world.  If we weren't, we
would not need the GNU project and this Usenet group.

-- 
David Kastrup