I wouldn't mind paying for information if I had some kind of guarantee in advance that I will *like* the information. I mean, I can *look* at a painting and decide whether I want to buy it or not. However when bookstores glare at you if you spend more than fifteen seconds scanning the back cover of the book, and when people sue you for copyright violation if you scan the cover of a book to put in your ebay post so people know what they are buying, and when things are still protected by copyright *fifty years* after the person who created the information is *dead*, I feel perfectly justified in saying the system is broken and needs to be reformed. Also, I don't think different kinds of information shoudl all be treated the same. In my mind, there is a world of difference in the benefit to society to making all paintings free vs. all textbooks, for example. Some things just are not benefitted by being open source. Open source poetry, for example, sounds like a Really Bad Idea. Open source literary criticism, on the other hand, may or may not be a bad thing. Open source software is a great idea. I want things that would benefit from being free to be free.
More broadly, I want society to value the sames things I do, at the same relative importance that I do, and I wantwhat I consider "common sense" to be generally accepted. As you said, "It's nice to want things."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regna
Re: Highly Simplistic Rant on Copyright
Date: 2004-09-05 10:14 pm (UTC)More broadly, I want society to value the sames things I do, at the same relative importance that I do, and I wantwhat I consider "common sense" to be generally accepted. As you said, "It's nice to want things."