[Moderator's note: No, I don't want to open up the floodgate, but this has a genuinely new idea in it among some others -- the notion that perhaps the good of the entertainment industry isn't as important as general purpose computing. That said, this is far afield from cryptography (I'm only interested here because of the technological copy protection politics angle) and I'm not going to entertain followups unless they're genuinely interesting. --Perry]
Perhaps the time has come. Copyright was necessary in earlier times because so few people had the time to think and produce new ideas -- novels and songs were rare, valuable to society, cost a lot of time and effort to publish and distribute, and the people who made good ones had to be supported and protected. But these days a talented hobbyist can make really great music, do all the mixing digitally on his or her home system, and release, and there are hundreds of thousands of talented hobbyists. The publishers and studios can add no value. Graphic artists can work at home now. Pixels don't care a bit whether they're produced in a studio. Publishing houses have more good novels available than they can ever publish, even not counting the professional novelists. And it is now possible for a hobbyist writer or musician to publish entirely on the net at very little cost to themselves - or if someone mirrors the work, at no cost to themselves whatsoever. So, a few random ideas to keep in mind the next time you hear someone arguing that computers must be crippled: Society no longer needs copyright. Society *DOES* need general-purpose computers. To the extent that copyright threatens general-purpose computing, it is harmful. With the Internet, we no longer need publishers and distributors. Go to a site like MP3.com and see how visibly redundant they have become. Good musicians can play club dates and get a percentage of the door, and sell signed disks they burn themselves to the people at the concert. Good authors can go on lecture tours, or get paid by bookstores for promotional appearances. or, maybe, we can just leave it at "real artists have day jobs." Bear --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]