On 8/8/2011 10:03 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> But in the context of "you're doing it wrong"...."YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG!"
> - taking down someone who has nothing doesn't send a message other than
> you're a bunch of moneygrubbing lawyers who don't pay their artists. They
> should talk more about the physical media counterfeiters they've busted
> and make some noise about that.
>
> Jim

Definitely. However, I *do* have one argument against copyright as it 
tends to exist today. Back when people wanted to make it basically 
perpetual (thanks Twain, you really where a twit about some things...), 
the argument was that most things would pass from the world anyway, so 
that wasn't an issue, what was is the ability of people to not have some 
publisher in Britain, or even Canada, selling your own book, without any 
money coming back to you for it. The problem today is that we have 30 
years of stuff in warehouses that *will* pass out of existence, without 
recovery, people holding on to it, not to protect the money they get 
from it, but just because it *might be* valuable, at some point, and the 
potential for almost everything to remain, even beyond the life of the 
artist, or the company that actually owns their works. So.. The result 
of this? If someone finds it interesting, even for no comprehensible 
reason, it might survive on some server on the internet, otherwise, it 
dies, just like more than half of *both* the valuable *and* crap works, 
from all prior generations.

And that, imho, is completely bloody stupid.

Its not an excuse to steal anything, but a lot of it is based on 
precisely the sort of thing that some people use to justify doing so. 
That the people who, in general, actually *own* the product, which is 
not to say the artist themselves, only give a shit about grinding as 
much money out of it as possible, then reserving the right, to *maybe* 
use the name, if not one single scrap of the original work, in some 
cases, to sell more shit later on. A proposition that leaves "everyone" 
screwed, including the person that wrote the book or song, made the 
painting, created a game, etc. And, if that isn't bad enough, in some 
cases, like those games, the originals "vanish". Abandoned games, as 
they are called, being one case. Nearly everything from the early days 
of arcades being the other (and more often than not also falling into 
the "we decided to use the name, but completely change the game, instead 
of reproducing the original work!", category).

Needless to say, these trends piss me off to no end. Not the least 
because it means that, in some cases, theft may actually be the only way 
to actually *get* one of them, at all, there being no legit method to 
pay for the damn thing.

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