How can a single country legislate that music copying should be stopped.
Same way we legislated against the drug trade. Of course, it didn't
eliminate drugs, but it made the politicans look good, and it provided an
excuse for us to use whenever we want to bully a weaker country (i.e.,
anybody else) into toeing the line.
Copyright piracy, like growing drugs, is an business that's relatively
easy for a poor country to get into, so the result is that the US provides
a market opportunity for people who need money desperately, and then
shoots them when they try to take it.
Also like the drug war, copyright controls offer the promise of being
useful for controlling the domestic population, too. The Constitution
guarantees the right to make excerpts from a copyrighted work to comment
on it; but the DMCA makes it illegal to develop tools that would make that
excerpting possible. Once all published content is copy-protected, public
discourse will be locked down.
/===============================================================\
|John Stracke |Principal Engineer |
|jstracke(_at_)incentivesystems(_dot_)com |Incentive Systems, Inc. |
|http://www.incentivesystems.com |My opinions are my own. |
|===============================================================|
|"Call me a Nervous Nellie, but I am concerned about the sale of|
|nuclear arms in my general neighborhood." -- Dave Barry |
\===============================================================/