from slashdot, on RIAA vs File swapping..

9/3/2003 7:06 PM

sr

from slashdot, on RIAA vs File swapping.. interesting thought came by in what was otherwise a long drawn out discussion on the benfits of MD5 hashing and how to hack it. (trans: boring!) But this person has a point whether I agree with it or not. (I don't know yet) I thought it might provoke another brawl here, so I figured I should post it. Seriously, think about this in the greater context of inventions like movable type and telecom. And it may all go back to "is the internet bringing us all closer together or driving us further apart by exposing us to our differences as never before.. "   Discuss amongst yourselves.     posted at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=03/08/28/1217214   -------------------------------------   They are really fighting a losing battle.     Exchanging music is not about piracy, it is about exchanging culture, just like when my grandfather leant me some old Jazz records and said, "here, you might like this".     Today culture moves at the speed of light and the RIAA believes it has the right to tax this movement. It cannot succeed except by destroying the Internet.     I'm starting to believe, watching this debate evolve over many years, that the file traders are right, for the wrong reasons.     Human culture depends on exchange of ideas and information, and music and films are a large part of this in today's world. No album, no movie scene, no written text is a personal creation, they are all taken from the pool of common culture, modified, and redistributed.     Seeking all means to do this faster than ever - and ignoring the barriers, such as "ownership", that stand in the way - is the prerrogative of today's world. We simply can't put the genie back into the bottle and start exchanging pieces of paper and vinyl discs again.     The debate is huge, but the results already seem clear: any laws designed to stop the process from continuing will be further and further ignored until they are seen by a majority of people to be useless vestiges of a material-obsessed past.