[Gllug] Re: Black day

Mark Preston mark at markpreston.co.uk
Thu Jan 16 23:47:33 UTC 2003


I agree with Jason Clifford regarding Peter Pan.
However good the cause this is not desirable use of copyright law.
Is anyone seriously suggesting that our freedoms to perform, modify or 
enjoy a piece of work should be put at risk forever in this manner? What 
if this were backdated to include Shakespeare, Virgil or Homer. Even 
worse, what if their modern day equivalents were prevented from writing 
great stories for the future because of perpetual copyright laws had 
just about covered every possible storyline. Why, of all the performing 
rights, should this particular one be accorded special dispensations and 
none others? If M$ gave it's "performance rights" payments to support a
hospital, would this make it's "closed source" approach any more noble?
The core problem with copyright is that enforcement of it requires 
monitoring of communications, and you cannot guarantee free speech if 
someone is monitoring everything you say. This is important, most people 
fail to address this point when debating the issue of copyright, so let 
  it be clear:

You cannot guarantee freedom of speech and enforce copyright law.

I would prefer to have the benefits of anonymity and freedom of speech 
at the expense of copyright law and censorship, especially when dealing 
with the internet.
Therefore, I tend to look very closely at the copyright terms before
agreeing to them, and avoid restrictive terms if at all possible.
Regards,
Mark Preston
BTW I am hoping to attend the meeting on Saturday 18th Jan and intend to 
bring a laptop which has Red Hat 8.0 and Windows 98 running on it at 
present. I have also got a Debian 3.0 bootable cdrom (1st disk). If 
anybody could show me how to install it (possibly replacing Red Hat 8.0) 
I'd like to meet them at the meeting. I have managed to get Debian 
installed before, but never managed to get X configured. Even if not 
successful, I'd like to watch how a Debian advocate/enthusiast/guru 
would approach this task.




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