Micah wrote a great piece on the debate about Eisner's article on why we need greater protection of digital content. It's a great counter to Dave's argument, which seems to be, "Eisner is an asshole who makes too much money, and what he wants will never work anyway." It's a great devil's-advocate argument that I haven't seen being expressed by anywone who isn't the mouth of a BigCo, and it makes a lot of sense.
What if everything in Wallmart could be had for free. There were still registers in the front but the entire back side of the store was open so you could walk right out with anything you took off the shelf. At first only a few adventurous souls took things, but then more and more until there was a torrent of people head out the back. Everyone was talking about it. In the isles of the grocery stories people would talk about there new Flat Screen TVs and complete collections of Disney films on DVD. When the store manager complained people said he was already a millionaire and the money he got wasn't going to all those poor foreign workers who actually made the products.
Good points, but there's a problem: the back of the Wal-Mart is long gone. If Eisner and his ilk want to set up registers across it, I have no problem with that, but they want more. A TV paid for at the back of the store will cost you more than one bought out the front, and it will automatically turn itself off when anyone who didn't pay for it walks into the room.
Dave, I understand that you want to legally pay for things, but you want more freedom than the creators of the goods wants to give you.
The ammount of freedom the creators of the goods want us to have is irrelevant; the issue is the ammount of freedom we are allotted by law. The BigCo's want to infringe on our Fair Use rights of the products they create, and I can't stand with that.
Unfortunately, I tend to think that legal and moral arguments on both sides will eventually be moot, and reality will rear its ugly head and bite us all. Big media companies will shring dramatically, those of us who pay for our music and movies and other content will pay more (software-sized prices for a movie or CD), and that's the way it's going to be. The smart music and movie companies will start selling their goods over the web in some format, probably not protected by encryption.
It's possible that the BigCo's, with the help of Microsoft, will have things their way. Windows won't allow you to copy certain files (they already have the patents for this), and Windows will be the the only operating system that we, the citizenry, are legally permitted to purchase and use. And when I want to distribute software that I create, or my boss wants to distribute music he created in his home studio, we'll have no simple way to do it without submitting it to a BigCo for encryption and signing.
When that happens, it's time to move to Canada and start using Linux full-time.
8:06:16 PM 
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