Mr. Ivey,
You should be speaking at the Republican National Convention.
You wax eloquently about freedom of speech even though you know it to be shibboleth. No one is free to say whatever they want.
I think most people want the same laws prohibiting libel, slander, hate speech, child pornography, terroristic threat, fraud, etc. to be equally applied to "the internet" as to every other form of communication.
What I do not fully understand, and what no one has properly explained (even the erstwhile lawrence lessig) is why copyright has become a special exception. Why should established copyright laws be excluded, or substantially weakened, when the form of communication is the Internet?
Arguing "freedom of speech" when the issue is copyright also seems at odds with logic: copyrighted materials are normally excluded from concepts of freedom of speech.
Free speech is a late development in the rights of man - as is the US Constitution. History teaches us that there is are even more fundamental rights.
Almost 6 centuries before the "Miracle at Philadephia," on a Monday morning in June 1215, King John of England was met in the meadow at Runnymede by the leaders or the barons and forced to sign the humiliating document that we know today as the Magna Carta.
It does not take too many generational cycles for a hereditory system of government to reveal it flaws and the reign of King John was a high water mark of mismanagement: the barons felt they needed some security from the capricious actions of the King John and his progeny and so the Magna Carta was the baron's attempt to subject the King to the rule of law.
As Winston Churchill observed, "It is entirely lacking in any spacious statement about the rights of man. It is not a declaration of constitutional doctrine, but a practical document to remedy current abuses in the fedual system."
It was a document intended to protect the property rights of the landed class.
And here is my point: The right to own property, Mr. Ivey, is at least as important as the right to free speech. As a practical matter, I wouold argue that it is the more important right, predating the right of free speech enshrined in the US bill of rights by 570 some odd years. I would not be so quick to discard it to satisfy the ambitions of Slashdot readers.
Churchill made another important observation:
"Magna Carta must not however be dismissed lightly, in the words of a modern writer, as 'a monument of class selfishness." Even in its own day men of all ranks above the status of villeins had an interest in securing that the tenure of land should be secure from arbitrary encroachment. Moreover, the greatest magnate might hold, and often did hold, besides his estate in chief, parcels of land under the most diverse tenures, by knight service, by the privileges of 'socage,' or as a tenant at will. Therefore in securing themselves the barons of Runnymede were in fact establishing the rights of the whole landed class, great and small - the simple knight with two hundred acres, the farmer or small yeoman with sixty."
I will not attempt to equate the actions of the barons with the RIAA, but I do think that it is important to recognize that in killing the RIAA by eviserating their copyrights, you may also be killing the seeds of the creative future.
You have your scary future, and I have mine.
Despite appearances, I am not trying to get in the last word, I am working on a book about some of these topics and I appreciate the opportunity to vent some of my ideas here.
Thank you for your many thoughtful comments. I am glad that we do not wholly agree because it helps me to learn.
Regards,
eric stasik.
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Topic: MGM v. Grokster (Read 5566 times)
