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Originally posted by HarmlessRabbit
I don't know where you're getting the idea that I want P2P software/networks/protocols banned. I don't. I'm just saying that those who choose to trade copyrighted files over those networks (which, you have to admit, is 99.999999% of P2P traffic) are breaking copyright law.
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Sorry, you're right. It's too tempting to use this opportunity at the soap box...
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This argument doesn't hold up at all. Let's say I'm the furniture designer Herman Miller, a well-known furninture designer, and I've spent a lot of time designing this new chair. You're a janitor in their building and you take pictures and copy designs for that chair and share them with Herman Miller's competitors. Did you damage Herman Miller? Yes. Is it illegal or a civil action? Frankly, I don't know, I just know it is wrong.
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My argument holds plenty of water. In fact, my argument is a perfect analogy. It's how you interpret the actions that's different.
I can understand that if
Herman Miller tried hard to keep something a secret and people in sensitive positions leaked that information, then that should result in a perfectly legitimate lawsuit. However, once
Herman Miller displayed their chair to the public, it's public knowledge how that chair works!
Of course, this is my opinion. How the actual law works is quite uncertain when it comes to IP. These days, everything's up to interpretation and anything can happen...
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Intellectual Property is real property. Without intellectual property laws research and development in the USA would grind to a halt.
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Intellecual property is
not real property, in my opinion, and I'm not alone in thinking this. You can't put a fence around it and you can't take it from someone. Unlike property, if I have an idea, you can't take that idea from me. To treat intellectual property as physical property (until recently, it was simply "
property," for obvious reasons) is folly and we're experiencing the limits to this analogy. Something's gonna give in the next hundred years or so, I just don't know what.
Oh, and innovation has been going on for millenia. To think that research and development in the US would suddenly halt is proposterous. It's like how the RIAA are saying that all art would stop without copyright law enforcement, despite the fact that art has existed long before copyright!
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You're basically arguing that copyright law has no basis in american society, and that it is perfectly OK to go and make perfect digital copies of any books, magazines, websites, or anything else you please, and distribute them to whomever you want, as long as the original source document isn't taken from the owner in the process.
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Almost, yes.
While I do understand the need for copyright under certain circumstances, I think it has been perverted too far to be useful. I think current IP laws do more harm than good.
Big corporations have way too much power and the Sonny Bono Act is a good example of it. What's currently happening is that copyright technically has an expiry date but we know it doesn't because these big corporations (Disney in particular) will just turn around and say "we need to extend copyright," and the US government will say "yeah, okay!" ad infinitum.
Consider this. Why was there ever an expiry date on copyright?