At the LPUK unofficial blog, Patrick Vessey remarks upon the government’s arse-about-face method of dealing with the concept of ‘illegal P2P filesharing’.
He says:
The current stated policy of the Libertarian Party is one of support for ‘intellectual property rights’. This isn’t a policy that I personally agree with, and I will try to make the time to post in the near future to explain…
I will be interested to see this. I have worked with ‘intellectual property’ in various forms for most of my life. I thought I more or less knew the general principles, but then in the last few years the greedheads have been getting a little out of hand.
A recent case involved the work of animator Joanna Davidovitch, which was posted on YouTube and subsequently the subject of a wholly unjustified takedown order from Viacom, a huge media corporation.
There have also been a number of allegations (e.g. here) about the peculiar behaviour of M$ Windows Media Player 11. A constant rumour is that a musician who records a piece of their own work and unwisely uses WMP11 to play it may then find that it has been secretly assigned a DRM code which is owned by M$, preventing the composer from ever playing it again without first paying up.
One expects at any moment to be told that the key of F sharp has been ‘patented’ by some huge record company, and that anyone so much as writing its key signature on a stave will be liable. Naturally governments play along with this; for one thing they need the bribe money; for another they need the media corporations to keep the public under hypnosis; and for a third they quite fancy imposing draconian controls on all personal computer operations anyway, preferably with a side order of substantial taxes.
The present intellectual property laws, particularly those being imposed here under remote control from Hollywood, are without doubt an ass. How they should be reformed is a larger subject. Whether there should be such a concept as ‘intellectual property’ I don’t really know; I think there has to be, but its emphasis must be on protecting the creators of this property from the huge corporations, rather than, as we now see it, the other way round.
I downloaded the .pdf file referenced from the government website, but on trying to read it nearly all the characters in it come out as little squares. An expert tells me that this is probably due to the font used in the document, mentioning technical terms such as ‘dodgy’, ‘unembedded’, ‘display-only’, and ‘not paid for’.
