Somehow the current copyright wars remind me quite a bit of the European dark middle ages, where the Roman-Catholic inquisition tried to weed out the "heretics" - many of which had only tried to keep the church out of secular politics:

They said then that the church is supposed to be poor and should not have a say in earthly matters. We say now that the Content Cartel is rich enough and shouldn't have any more control over how we use data and that information wants to be free.

They were burned at the stake by the greedy church functionaries who wanted to control everything and make money. We're prosecuted by the Content Cartel's henchmen who want to control all the data in the world and make money.

They were not successful initially, but today the RC church is no longer of importance as far as secular matters are concerned (unless you're foolish enough to live in fundamentalist places like the USA). ... We have encryption. And deniability. And steganography. And Guerilla tactics. And networks. And a thick skin. We'll win.

A couple of recent voices:

A BBC producer on the fact that file sharing is not theft.
The MPAA can't convince anybody to let themselves be violated by their A(ss)hole proposals.
Here on Oz, not just the usual voices of Reason v1.0 but also government-backed committees say that copyright control powers should be scaled back extensively.

[ published on Fri 03.03.2006 13:28 | filed in interests | ]
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© Alexander Zangerl