Sorry Ricardo, but you have a very distorted vuew of the world imvho.
On Fri, 2004-01-09 at 03:01, Ricardo Andere de Mello wrote:
oh man... theory is a nice thing...
Law is not theory, it is very practical. A complex society like us cannot live whitout laws.
Said that, I know there are some very bad laws, but it is not breacking them that you make a good job, the right thing to do with bad laws is to change them.
but remember that hollywood studios could not avoid decss being spread all over the world.
Policy cannot stop mafia, or drugs sellers, or murders, so what?
And if you are capable of playing DVD on your GNU/Linux box, you should thank little Jon. We know he did something wrong (not actually from his country law, only americam law), but I think he did a VERY GOOD thing, because he enabled thousands of people to watch movies on their computers.
I'm not sure it is illegal even in the US, as the decss has nothing to do with copying a dvd, you can pick a DVD and copy it encrypted, then take the copy and put it on a dvd player, and it will run perfectly. DeCSS is used only to segmentate the market in 6 areas over the world, and the practice seem also to be illegal and complaints have been made to WTO.
These rules works on court, but the internet has another rules.
Internet has the same rules as physical world, please do net get childish ...
Is it hard to understand this? If it is legal, it will be free software, if not, they will call it piracy, but it will still exist.
Murders exist, so what?
You can sue one guy, but can you sue the entire world? What is the point of being illegal?
Change the law, do not break it.
In another example, reverse engineering was a normal learning process for hackers, now everybody keeps doing the same thing, but just don't tells that does. I don't know one hacker that at some point of his life does not reverse engineered some proprietary software, just to see how it works, or to have more balls at his pinball game.
1: reverse engineering is perfectly legal in most of the world and protected by copyright law. 2: given point 1 I do not understand your point here.
The "underground" will always exist, and the internet will guarantee it's existence.
"The Underground" existed before internet too ...
For each software protection created, 10 minutes later a new crack is created. I'm NOT discussing if piracy is write or wrong. I'm just saying that it exists for one reason: "People want access to information!".
So people should make their politicians change the laws to make it perfectly legal, breaking law put you always on the wrong side.
Here in Brazil, a music CD is about 12 dollars. This is VERY expensive for our country. There are pirate CDs being sold for 1.5 dollars, a lot more affordable for poor people. Who have money buy the original, who don't, buy the piracy. If capitalism cannot solve digital exclusion, maybe piracy (and free software) can.
High prices are not a matter of capitalism, they are a problem of lack of real competitions. CD Producers live in a complete monopoly so they make the price they want, they are not subject to competition (this means they are outside any form of real capitalism), as you cannot seriously tell me that you can have competition beetwen different goods. If I do not like Madonna (just an example), I'll not buy his CD even if it costs half the price of my favourite singer.
Simo.