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“The, “business of companies that want to sell mass market goods to consumers is not suing those consumers,” said p2pnet, quoting Bill Patry, who went on, “The business of the RIAA may be doing that because it has to justify its own existence, but the business of business is business, not litigation”.However, Patry says he’s an, “enormous fan of the copyright industries and a, “very steady source of income to it,” stating »»»I buy about 300 books a year. I take my kids to see every kids’ movie, buy the DVD when it comes out, and also buy two copies of the same product as a Nintendo DS game (which can be $30-$35 times two); I have bought maybe a hundred DVDs of Nickelodeon TV show DVDs, I buy dozens of CDs and would buy a lot more if the industry had supported the SACD format. I take my kids to live musical events. As a musician (clarinet) I buy lots of sheet music. I buy four hard copy newspapers a day and subscribe to ten monthly magazines a month. I have not bought any of these because they were copyrighted; indeed most of the sheet music is in the public domain but I am still happy to pay good money for a nice edition.The most respect that we can pay to copyright industries is to think only about buying such products and not copyright. The music industry forgot this.Says Crosbie Fitch in a Reader’s Write, “I posted a comment on William’s blog this morning (the 3rd comment of mine on his new blog - he no longer publishes my comments, so they are effectively personal correspondence - assuming no spam filter) that pointed out he was barking up the wrong tree if he was waiting for the monkeys to drop down a new business model for the producers and customers of intellectual work,” continuing »»»That devoted expectation is properly recognised as cargo-cultism.How can an industry that is based upon the idea of selling copies be expected to come up with a business model that is based upon the idea of selling intellectual work instead?The last thing the copyright industries will come up with is the idea that people should be free to make and sell their own copies, to enjoy their natural cultural liberty. The corporation will not surrender their monopoly, because they have nothing to lose by keeping it, no conscience to pang them, no humanity to gain.But then, if the lawyers are loonies for expecting salvation to come from monopolists, what the heck are we doing expecting enlightenment to come from lawyers?Lawyers are mentally handicapped. They have had their instinctive sense of ethics surgically removed at law school: “As lawyers you are not to determine who is right or wrong, good or bad, nor what the law should be, but what the law IS, and how to exploit your knowledge of the law in the interests of your client - whether state, corporation, or individual.”So here we have the sorry sight of a bunch of copyright lawyers looking in satisfaction at the scales of justice, whilst having the niggling suspicion that perhaps something isn’t quite right.In one pan there is the commercial interest of the immortal publishing corporation: their precious privilege of copyright (oh, and a large ingot of plutonium). In the other pan there is the cultural interest of the mortal individual in sharing music with their fellow man (whether Jammie Thomas, Brittany Kruger, or Joel Tenenbaum): their liberty to do so suspended from an arm of the balance by an invisible thread.Not only has the publisher’s pan broken its chain, but it has smashed a hole through the table and is currently melting a crater in the floor on its way to China.And what are the lawyers wondering?Not whether justice has been done - it plainly has been done in their warped minds, but whether the prosecution of copyright infringers was a wise strategy.Oh, right. Copyright is fine. It’s just that some publishers might have been ill advised to rub their customers up the wrong way by prosecuting and bankrupting a few who disrespected their monopoly, as a lesson to the rest of them.The lawyers’ collective blindness to the corruption that has just occurred before their very eyes is staggering.It’s like a bunch of Guantanamo doctors wondering whether the repeated drowning and resuscitation of people plucked at random from Afghanistan, whilst a justifiable information retrieval technique, is conducive to the dissuasion of terrorism and the encouragement of greater respect for US corporations’ trading infrastructure.Guys? Haven’t you forgotten something?What happened to the natural rights of the individual?What happened to liberty? What happened to the land of the free?“There is something wrong with the picture of ‘justice’ before you,” Fitch says, adding:“Mend the scales, remove the plutonium, clean up the mess and abolish the unethical privilege of copyright. Restore all individuals’ liberty to share and build upon mankind’s cultural commonwealth.”
