Today the Financial newspaper had a front page article about a court case outcome where downloading of copyrighted material was made illegal. The Dutch government has a different viewpoint, they believe making a copy at home etc. should be possible. Bla bla
What makes me nervous is that we don't have a more fundamental debat about this and about our 1912 laws that govern these issues. It's 2008 for crying out loud and technology has changed the way we do things. Shouldn't we be adapting our laws too? It's all a bit strange and weird that we do not want to undertake action to make this a healthy domain again. My view is simple. Technology itself shouldn't be punished for creating new abilities, people that use these new tools shouldn't be punished too. Creators of IP (Intellectual Property) should be protected against people and companies using their work for commercial gain and should be able to earn money every time their work is used by someone. So every person should pay for a piece of 'digital IP' and the price is set by the creator, if nobody buys, the price will come down. Once you have it you should be able to use it at your convenience, no rocket science here. Debates about free, technology as democratic base for all you can do and other bla bla and other logic that stops creative people and businesses to earn cash with their work just don't stick to common sense. I refer to >> Creative Commons as a good alternative for what currently exists. Why does nobody talk about this, why isn't this debate alive and why aren't governements around the world making sure we resolve this BIG issue? I don't know, maybe I'm a bit 'hammerd shut' about this subject because of my involvement. Let's see when the Dutch record labels start suing individual downloaders and let's see if that is going to make the change.
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