On 21/07/07, Larry Garfield <larry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I never said that "artificial laws" should all be thrown out. They should, however, be understood in their proper context. A physical object can only be in the possession of one person at a time, per the laws of physics. Property law enhances and structures that natural situation.
Uh, what was all that about quantum mechanics and superposition? Could you please run that by me again?
Information, which includes both ideas and their creative expression, by nature becomes known to anyone it touches without depriving the originator of it. It can be possessed by more than one person simultaneously. Copyright law artificially creates such a restriction on movement in an attempt to make its creation more economically attractive. It is not, however, directly based on physical laws. Note that I am not making a statement about right or wrong about either of the above sorts of laws. I am simply explaining them in proper context, because one cannot make a viable statement about whether they are right or wrong without understanding them in proper context. Speeding while driving is also an "artificial law" in that regard, as there is no physical law that says a car can only go 30 mph. That doesn't make speeding OK or less illegal, it just means that it is not a natural law.
In Germany, there is. Get up to 250 KPH and the speed limiter kicks in. It also almost kicks you out of your seat.
In every online copyright debate I've gotten into, people always seem to assume that "either you're with us or you're with the evil terr'ist pirates". Nothing could be further from the truth, nor further from actual sense. That's why I keep getting into these debates; to point out that it's not a simple "copyright is moral and eternal vs. rampant theft and economic downfall" question.
M$ has already stated how they depend upon the pirates. If eveybody who could not afford Windows as a student switched to linux, then they would have nobody to sell Windows to when those students grow up. Dotan Cohen http://lyricslist.com/ http://what-is-what.com/ -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
