[Slynky]

Originally posted by PvK:
As for the actual topic of the thread...

in my opinion, cassette recorders and xerox machines were the beginning of the obsolescence of legal control of public media duplication. Affordable CD writers, the Internet, and contemporary computers, as well as audio/visual encoding devices, have made it entirely practical to share almost all forms of media freely with everyone on the planet. The service of location, distribution, and duplication of almost all media can now be trivially and extremely inexpensively performed by computers.

The world's economic and legal systems [are] quite obsolete and extremely counter-productive, compared to technical realities. We've got these megacorporations invested in the old system of ownership desperately trying to keep us from using computers to do what they do naturally - copy data. Our culture as a whole hasn't really figured out what has happened yet, and has no consensus on what to do about it.

However, this situation is an ocean that can't be held back forever by an artificial dam. Or at least, humans will be an even sillier race than they already are if they try to keep themselves from being able to copy data forever.

PvK

And humans, apparently unable to control themselves, will naturally "steal" something if it's easy to do. Sad commentary, isn't it?