Copying in the USSR
John Naughton in the Observer, puts the argument for sanity and against Hollywood sponsored crippling of our computers better than anyone I've read:
"Many years ago your columnist spent a sabbatical year at a Dutch university. Among the other visiting research fellows was a prominent Russian scientist who was, at the time, a vice-president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
It is, perhaps, difficult to conceive of it now, but in the pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union this meant he was a very big cheese indeed - a member of the governing elite, the nomenklatura, with his own chauffeur-driven limo, permission to travel abroad, a good apartment and a dacha in the woods outside Moscow. You name it, this guy had it.
Before he returned home, I invited him for a drink. 'What will you miss most from your time in Holland?' I asked. 'Oh, that's easy,' he replied. 'The photocopier.'
'Eh?' I said. 'You see,' he explained, 'back home I sometimes spend two or three days in the scientific periodicals library copying out articles from journals.'
It transpired that access to photocopiers was one of the most tightly restricted privileges in Brezhnev's empire. The reason was obvious: a photocopier is a potential printing press, and a regime obsessed with controlling the dissemination of information must control print facilities."
A must read (via the phenomenal Boing Boing)
5:37:39 PM 
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