When Pigs Fly: The Death of Oink, the Birth of Dissent Options

[boombaard]

perhaps an interesting/entertaining read: (not by my hand, found it yesterday)
http://www.demonbaby.com/blog/2007/10/when...k-birth-of.html

For quite a long time I've been intending to post some sort of commentary on the music industry - piracy, distribution, morality, those types of things. I've thought about it many times, but never gone through with it, because the issue is such a broad, messy one - such a difficult thing to address fairly and compactly. I knew it would result in a rambly, unfocused commentary, and my exact opinion has teetered back and forth quite a bit over the years anyway. But on Monday, when I woke up to the news that Oink, the world famous torrent site and mecca for music-lovers everywhere, had been shut down by international police and various anti-piracy groups, I knew it was finally time to try and organize my thoughts on this huge, sticky, important issue.

edit2: thanks for editing the title, kind (and anonymous) moderator

This post has been edited by boombaard: Oct 29 2007, 23:57

[neomoe]

numbers are interpreted by a program, so they are more like words. can words be owned? sure they can when put in the right order.
take goethe's faust for example. that's what intellectual property is all about.

This post has been edited by neomoe: Oct 30 2007, 21:35

[plnelson]

numbers are interpreted by a program, so they are more like words. can words be owned? sure they can when put in the right order.
take goethe's faust for example. that's what intellectual property is all about.

Exactly. I'm a published writer and photographer, not to mention a software engineer. All of those expressions of my labor and creativity can be encoded digitally and copied perfectly an infinite number of times. But they are still all mine and if someone misappropriated them I would have both the legal and moral right to take action against them.

The world economy is increasingly based on knowledge and symbol manipulation - the fruits of millions of people's labor are "just" numbers. We're not living in Victorian England where a good day's work depended on sweating limbs and clanging hammers. The long term legal trend is to strengthen rights for abstract property, as well it should given that more and more people's livelihoods depend on it.