"If someone breaks into my house and steals my CDs, who calls the cops, me or the music industry?" Safir asked. "If it's me, then that's my property."
Copyright 2002
If children must grow able to leverage computers to meet their own
goals as free citizens, that's not possible with commercial software,
period. -- Ruben Safir
Copyright 1999 - Said at DECSS Trail in NYC
DRM is Theft Copyrighted 2002
"Jack Valanti is to Private Ownership and Property
as the Boston Strangler to the VCR"
Copyrighted August 2002
Me or Universal Pictures?
DRM is Theft. Congress must pass a law which will
protect the property of every owner of a computer
and purchaser of Digital Information by outlawing
anything which prevents the full enjoyment of their
property. We don't need prior aproval of Warner
Brothers, Jack Valenti, or Barry Sorkin to use our
computers to augment our enjoyment of our property.
There is no forced contract to a cash sale. Forcing
a contract on the public which they didn't negotiate
as equal partners is a form of slavery no free citizen
can put up with.
That's why we propose a New Fair Use Bill, one which
guarantees that Copyright is secondary to the
Constitutional Right of Security in ones Home and
with one's pocessions. Because Copyright is secondary
to my property rights in my home and Congress has to make
it clear.
If anyone should be forced into a license, then Bertleson
should be forced to License to Listen.com. That's why we
gave them the limited exclussive Monopoly in the first place,
to make sure the material is published. If they don't want to
publish, too bad, make them do it anyway or strip them of
their Monopoly.
How can we can we continue to expect to maintain a free
society if we can't accumulate, copy and archive on our
digital systems and information. How are we expected to
be able to publish from annotated facts, with references
to the original works when everything on the internet can
expire or disapear. We have to be able to copy to archive.
It's essential to our politcal speech, or for that matter
our abilty to have party music mixed to our own enjoyment
on Saturday Night."
We decided, after much discussion and after considering many opinions on the mailing lists, to attempt to drive into the public lexicon the phrases, "DRM is Theft" and "We are the Stakeholders". We carefully chose these expressions to counter the rhetoric coming out of the copyright monopoly content industry, especially the claim by Senator Hollings that he had assembled all the "stakeholders" to write his CBDTPA bill and Jack Valenti's rhetoric that the simple act of listening to a DVD on a GNU/Linux operating system is stealing property from the motion picture industry.
Copyrgiht August 2001
"I'm an engineer. I choose the best tool for the job, politics be damned."
You must be a stupid engineer then, because politcs and technology have been attacted at the hip since the 1st dynasty in Ancient Egypt.
I guess you missed that one."
Fair Use -
because it's either fair use or useless....