[CYBERIA] Open Letter to Jack Valenti and Michael Eisner

[bear]

[Moderator's note: No, I don't want to open up the floodgate, but this
has a genuinely new idea in it among some others -- the notion that
perhaps the good of the entertainment industry isn't as important as
general purpose computing. That said, this is far afield from
cryptography (I'm only interested here because of the technological
copy protection politics angle) and I'm not going to entertain
followups unless they're genuinely interesting. --Perry]

Perhaps the time has come.

Copyright was necessary in earlier times because so few people
had the time to think and produce new ideas -- novels and songs
were rare, valuable to society, cost a lot of time and effort
to publish and distribute, and the people who made good ones
had to be supported and protected.

But these days a talented hobbyist can make really great music,
do all the mixing digitally on his or her home system, and release,
and there are hundreds of thousands of talented hobbyists.  The
publishers and studios can add no value.  Graphic artists can work
at home now.  Pixels don't care a bit whether they're produced in
a studio.  Publishing houses have more good novels available than
they can ever publish, even not counting the professional novelists.
And it is now possible for a hobbyist writer or musician to publish
entirely on the net at very little cost to themselves - or if
someone mirrors the work, at no cost to themselves whatsoever.

So, a few random ideas to keep in mind the next time you hear
someone arguing that computers must be crippled:

Society no longer needs copyright.

Society *DOES* need general-purpose computers.

To the extent that copyright threatens general-purpose computing,
it is harmful.

With the Internet, we no longer need publishers and distributors.
Go to a site like MP3.com and see how visibly redundant they have
become.

Good musicians can play club dates and get a percentage of the door,
and sell signed disks they burn themselves to the people at the
concert.

Good authors can go on lecture tours, or get paid by bookstores for
promotional appearances.

or, maybe, we can just leave it at "real artists have day jobs."

				Bear


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