On Sunday 06 September 2009, shirish wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 5, 2009 at 14:36, jtd<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> > Actually copyright law in several countries, believe in shooting the
> > messenger. So the service provider (Raj, FOSSCOM, net connectivity guy
> > etc) are actually liable for copyright violations. This is precisely the
> > premise under which P2P networks were taken down.
> > With copyright violations being criminalised in India, we are following
> > in the same footsteps as USA, France, UK etc.
>
> are you saying that copyright violations should not be criminalised .
> If so how do you see them ?

YES. If you check the history of copyright law, you will find that it 
originally was meant to protect the producer from being gyped of his work, 
and that if he could prove loss of income, he was compensated to that extent 
+ some more. Thus fair use and non commercial (or non-sabotage ) copying was 
perfectly legal.
Unlike it's present form where corporations have usurped this purpose from the 
artist and indulge in stupid behaviour like not allowing to play a legally 
purchased piece of music or sports bcast in a restaurant - not a private pay 
per view, but a propah public broadcast for which they have recieved the 
rights to obtain income from ads. I.E, chew up my time, electricity and 
viewing pleasure in return for force fed ads. Note such public vieweing will 
actually add value to ads. They also prevent me from making a copy of the 
program. Same goes with radio broadcast, wherein the radio station has to pay 
royalty for popularising music. Earlier the government broadcasting stations 
were guaranteed the right to broadcast any published material over the radio 
waves as a public service. 

> While I do agree for short copyright terms, say of the original 14
> years, I do have strong views on copyright violations.

dont get brainwashed by the media and newspaper propaganda. Proper 
implementation of the old law was more than adequate. We are not even 
bringing in the "means of mass producing and publishing" and "look and feel 
before buying"  argument which changes the economics of publishing upside 
down and spinning around, and actually imo makes the old copyright law 
pointless.

>
> <snip>
>
> > Unfortunately court decisions have taken precisely the stance that you
> > argue against.
>
> which means there is a precedent.

Yes. Primarily because of quiet changes to the law, without imo due 
consultation of the public.

>
> Yesterday, I just had an interesting conversation on something
> similar, not purely in context but very much in common with some of
> the observations about  communities and FOSS-based communities at
> that.
>
> The said person, let's call him 'Mr. X' contended that his mails were
> not being sent because he top-posts. Mr. X is a businessman and he
> wants to do some commercial activity using GNU/Linux as a base. He
> doesn't understand why posts have to be in a certain way to be
> accepted.
>
> >From what he understands about 'FOSS' 

You said it. Most people's understanding of FOSS is more missed understanding, 
to put it politely.

> >is we can remix things as we 
> like. That is the differentiation that we seek to provide from
> commercial closed-source software (or not) .

A lot more, many of which is not likely to fit his view of reality. 

>
> While I did manage to pacify him to an extent, but this is something
> we need to think about. Is it about what is called the 'strict
> mothering syndrome/style' that doesn't think there is diversity in how
> one feels.

Nobody is talking about feelings. Mail list etiquette, is primarily about 
being miserly in wasting everybody else's resources - bandwidth, storage, 
time. Unfortunately everbody loves to belabour "My freedom of expression" and 
several other  "superiority of method" arguments while chewing up everbody 
else's resources. 
Just pick a thread on the list and check the amount of dead, repeated data due 
to top post. Now multiply this by the number of list members. And this list 
is miniscule in comparison to many.

> Are we supposed to be uniformed in what we write, how we write and what we
> do.

You are flogging the wrong horse.


-- 
Rgds
JTD
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