Re: Stallman calls for an end to file sharing war

[David Kastrup]

Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> writes:

> In gnu.misc.discuss Ben Pfaff <blp@cs.stanford.edu> wrote:
>
>> I write free software in my spare time.  Why not require ISP users to
>> pay a fee to support me, too?  It wouldn't have to be a lot of money
>> per person, as long as everyone with an Internet connection was
>> required to pay me.
>
> Hey, I write free software too.  :-) I also don't download music or
> films (apart from very occasionally non-copyright recordings).

There is no such beast.  Even if the original has been created more than
50 years ago, the process of digitizing is, like making a good
photograph of a painting, something needing nominal skills and judgment
and consequently bordering on copyrightable.  There is a reason we get
flooded with "remastered" and "improved" recordings and "revised
editions" of old stuff: the idea is to obliterate copies with an older
copyright with something protected reasonably well anew.

> Why shouldn't we get a bit from an Internet fee?  Probably because the
> system would be swiftly subverted by some firm like Oracle or
> Microsoft, and we'd all end up paying them.

That's how the recording industry works.  That's how the free market
works: whenever you have "small people" with financially exploitable
rights, some organization will form in order to offer concentrating the
necessary business interactions, making them happen at all in many
cases, and making them more streamlined in some cases.  The streamlining
then diversifies into bureaucracy and business processes completely out
of control of their supporting energy source, and ultimately consuming a
large ratio of that what they are supposed to administer.

That's what corporations are about.  Then we have the financial market
in order to further separate and anonymize supporting forces and
resulting machinery.

In a free market, micropayments without administering corporations are
like capillary blood vessels without veins and arteries.

Just doesn't happen.

-- 
David Kastrup