Some good points are made in this piece below. If the choice is to follow the law as it is ie. the re-Internet law, or do something that is absolutely worth doing, and a benefit to society at large, then where will that leave most people in a digital society? Be 'criminal' or be blind or...deaf? This can't possibly be the intention of a meaningful copyright law.
Why Piracy Is Indispensable For The Survival Of Our Culture | Techdirt
That’s great, apart from one slight problem: under today’s copyright laws, all these wonderful backups that will probably ensure the programs’ survival while civilization itself is still around, are illegal. The choice is stark: follow copyright law, and watch decades of computer culture literally fade away on their unreadable floppies, or save them for posterity - and break the law. Nor is this is a problem that only concerns antediluvian forms of computing. Our cool, smartphone- and tablet-based approach is no better: take a look at the iTunes App Store, a 500,000 app repository of digital culture. It’s controlled by a single company, and when it closes some day (or it stops supporting older apps, like Apple already did with the classic iPod), legal access to those apps will vanish. Purchased apps locked on iDevices will meet their doom when those gadgets stop working, as they are prone to do. Even before then, older apps will fade away as developers decline to pay the $100 a year required to keep their wares listed in the store. This is a deep and fundamental problem with not just computing culture, but all artistic expression that is locked down with DRM. The only way that its glories will be preserved for future generations is if considerate “pirates” make illegal back-up copies, stripped of copy protection. For DRM is a guarantee of oblivion: the term of copyright is so disproportionately long, few will care about breaking ancient DRM to make backups of long-forgotten digital creations when it eventually becomes legally permissible to do so.
Recent Comments