[conspire] Book Burning continues thanks to the Feds

[Ruben Safir]

On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 07:51:18PM -0400, Luke S Crawford wrote:
> Ruben Safir <ruben at mrbrklyn.com> writes:
> 
> > Eventually, Google or someone else is going to start to pull this apart
> > with serious lobbying and political muscle, until the statutes are
> > clarified, and altered as necessary to end the impedment of information
> > revolution.  Then those copyright robber barons will be in serious
> > trouble as the ridicules business models for these scum is finally taken
> > apart piece by piece.
> 
> I do not think Google is the champion of public interest you are looking 
> for.
> 
> The problem with google is that they have no incentive to strengthen fair
> use for anyone but themselves.   Look at what they did with the android
> kernel;  they followed the letter of the rules, but they put little effort
> into getting their kernel changes upstream where they would benefit the rest 
> of us.   
> 
> I'm not saying that makes google evil;  they did follow the rules and 
> contribute patches back;  you aren't required to do anything besides
> throwing your patches over the fence.   But it is clear that they 
> are not altruistic;  if they can get around copyright without making
> it easier for anyone else to do so, they will.   Bonus for them, as it
> makes the competition spend a lot on lawyers.  
> 
> >From my (layman's) reading of the court case we are discussing, this is
> what google is doing in this case;  they are attempting to make a separate
> peace where they have special rights that their competition doesn't have 
> (at least not without spending a huge amount of money on lawyers and the like)


I agree with you in general.  I just think that google is the first
company big enough where they are betting a sizable amount of money on
reasonable fair use rights and such.  they tried to negotiate with this
crazies and got smacked down.  Now, if their Self-interest analysis is
where I think it should be, they are cornered into an assualt of the
current precidences and statuatary low, and have a big enough bull horn
to garner grass root supports for loosening the destructive constraints.

The Author's guild blunder here, I'm hoping, would be the equivilant of
the RIAA sueing and jailing 20 million 12 year olds using napster.  The political
backlash would cripple support for copyright law and cause massive
change and education.

Apple nearly dared the RIAA to sue them over the ipod with their
obviously slight of hand DRM.  The RIAA bliked.  The settlement was the
authors guild blinking.  It being smacked down in court means the rest
of the crazies did the deed.

Ruben
-- 
http://www.mrbrklyn.com - Interesting Stuff
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software

So many immigrant groups have swept through our town that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological proportions in the mind of the world  - RI Safir 1998

http://fairuse.nylxs.com  DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002

"Yeah - I write Free Software...so SUE ME"

"The tremendous problem we face is that we are becoming sharecroppers to our own cultural heritage -- we need the ability to participate in our own society."

"> I'm an engineer. I choose the best tool for the job, politics be damned.<
You must be a stupid engineer then, because politcs and technology have been attached at the hip since the 1st dynasty in Ancient Egypt.  I guess you missed that one."

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