🚀 go-pugleaf

In aus.computers.linux Sylvia Else <sylvia@not.at.this.address> wrote:

>> These sorts of cases aren't always about winning, they're often about 
>> scaring people into not putting up the fight. (SCO vs common sense is a 
>> great example of that).

> That's certainly true, but I'm not sure that the law can do much about 
> it. Even penalties for abuse of process (which is what the amdendments 
> about general drugs amount to in my view) would be difficult to apply in 
> practice.

Of course there is something that can be done about it... don't draft laws
that attempt to turn a natural state of affairs on its head for the benefit
of a small handful of people and the detriment of a great many.

What I'm saying here is that the easy and natural action is, if you have
useful information, you copy it and make it available to other people.
This is especially true of software but has always been standard practice
with recipes, jokes, general worldly advice, scientific discoveries,
folk stories, common melodies, religious Truths, legal decisions and most
of the information that human civilisation was founded upon.

The use of intellectual property as a mechanism to both construct artificial
scarcity and provide government with some capability of censorship
(a few narrow channels of information distribution are easier to maintain
control over than a great diversity of channels) was successful in the past
but improvements in communication are pushing the whole house of cards to
the breaking point.

At some point something has to give: either we lose some of our current
freedom to communicate and share our work with like minded people or the
publishing industry suffers a major backlash when people realise that it
isn't useful to them anymore. I guess there is a third way out which is
that the publishing industry adapts to the new technolgy but there is a
real fundamental problem which is that artificial information scarcity
is no longer easy to achieve -- same holds for software scarcity and
artistic scarcity. The publishing industry can only adapt by providing
real services and right now it doesn't know how to do that.


Consider other laws that have failed miserably for the same reason.
The prohibition of drugs for example, especially plant based drugs such
as hemp and opium. The natural action is if people find something that
they can easily produce and enjoy consuming, that's what they will do.
Plant based drugs are easy to produce in plentiful quantities and
should be available at low prices for anyone to use. However, the law
has established a situation of artificial scarcity coupled with criminal
sanctions which results in huge profits for a small number of people
and widespread misery for everyone else -- both addicts and the victims
of crimes caused by addiction.


If lawmakers can just resist the urge to pass laws that criminalise 
substantial sections of the population for the benefit of small but
powerful vested interests, they would find that abuse of the legal
system was far less common. Sadly, it's an urge that has proven very
hard to resist so far.

	- Tel