Great story, thanks Al.

The major entertainment monopolies are some of the most abusive and despicable outfits around. They screw everyone. In fact, they perform little service aside from screwing people. They do NOT facilitate the creation of entertainment because they preempt the creative rights of artists with contracts that reserve to themselves those rights. If someone manages to create something outside of such a contract they will sue to achieve the same purpose. Then they bribe congressmen to give them even more legal protections which they use in the most ruthless monopolistic ways imaginable.

The copyright laws, like the patent laws, have totally been distorted from their original purpose to protect creative people and have been turned into pretexts for extortive monopolistic enterprise. They should be radically pruned back, but, alas, I suspect they have such a stranglehold on congress that it will never happen.

Good article and good comment by Bliffle. Copyright turned from protection for artists to a protection racket. In spite of the success of iTunes the monopolies don't want to loosen their grip on the golden goose. I have no doubt they'd completely turn off the internet if they could; they see it as an enemy not an opportunity.

Thank you, Brother Rose.

Bliffle, as to protecting creative people, I'm to understand that it's generally considered that copyrights usually make 90% of their money within 2 years. That's pretty much the monetary motivation for creation. JK Rowling ain't motivated to write more Harry Potter novels because she's looking forward to income from them 20 or 30 years down the line.

And I'd REALLY like some explanation for how some schmucks running RCA having cartel control over 50 year old Elvis Presley records does anything whatsoever to promote the progress of science and useful arts.

I advise boycotts. Don't buy the offending issues. the obverse of that is to make sure you reward the worthy ones.

One might also use a sortof Selective Piracy. For example, in the halcyon days of IRC and DSL there were some fabulous libraries of classical music made available by some stalwarts like Sigmus and LordSauron and I took the opportunity to audition a number of performances before buying them, which I did. This puts a burden on one to be honorable and informed. It's a form of Guerilla Justice. Most pop music is extortionary and exploitive, so the little I listen to I might pirate, except for jazz. On the other hand, when I found that the royalties for "Wimoweh" were finally flowing to Solomon Lindas family I bought it from Amazon (Rounder records).

I'm still not sure why so many people support theft of intellectual property. It's all fun and games when it's a simple song, but those same rules apply to other arts and technologies. The same countries pirating your songs and cheap videos are the ones taking your manufacturing technology and jobs.

Red: all humans are larcenous at heart, we just await some pretext for justification. At the same time, we yearn for justice and are quite willing to pay a provider a just and reasonable fee. But the CD companies have sorely abused their privileged monopoly in order to extract extravagant monies from their captive customers. So, given the chance, we resort to guerilla consumerism to even the scales. And all the preaching about intellectual property rights and public morality are weighed against the notion that consumers are being victimized.