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Re: Stallman calls for an end to file sharing war


From: ZnU
Subject: Re: Stallman calls for an end to file sharing war
Date: Wed, 08 Dec 2010 16:02:51 -0000
User-agent: MT-NewsWatcher/3.5.3b3 (Intel Mac OS X)

In article <i8a2vv$hng$1@news.eternal-september.org>,
 Hadron<hadronquark@gmail.com> wrote:

> JEDIDIAH <jedi@nomad.mishnet> writes:
> 
> > On 2010-10-02, Hadron <hadronquark@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> 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. I salute you.
> >
> >      Seeds don't come from "mother nature". They're the result of thousands
> > of years of shared effort and common cultural heritage. Monsanto and Disney
> > are rather similar in this respect. Both abuse centuries of cooperation and
> > collaboration.
> 
> 
> LOL.
> 
> Thats up there with some of the more outrageous bullshit even you have
> spouted.

This doesn't happen often, and I'm sure he'll make me regret saying it 
soon enough, but Jed does have something resembling a point.

Today's food crops have been heavily modified from their natural forms 
by collectively practiced selective breeding over the centuries. 
Monsanto takes these, makes a few minor tweaks, and under current law, 
those tweaked versions become 100% Monsanto's property.

Similarly, much of what Disney does is take works that have become part 
of the culture (often fables or myths that have been collectively 
developed over long periods of time) and create derivative versions of 
them, which similarly, under current law, become 100% Disney's property.

Large corporations commonly draw heavily on the public domain, but are 
very much of the opinion that their own works should never enrich it.

-- 
"The game of professional investment is intolerably boring and over-exacting to
anyone who is entirely exempt from the gambling instinct; whilst he who has it
must pay to this propensity the appropriate toll." -- John Maynard Keynes


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