Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!caen!uflorida!math.ufl.edu!shadrach.math.ufl.edu!bb From: bb@math.ufl.edu (Brian Bartholomew) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: Adobe Type Manager to NeXT Message-ID: Date: 23 Apr 91 03:04:28 GMT References: <482@heaven.woodside.ca.us> Sender: news@math.ufl.edu Organization: University of Florida Department of Mathematics Lines: 97 In-Reply-To: glenn@heaven.woodside.ca.us's message of 21 Apr 91 20:21:54 GMT The following posting is quite long, and consists mainly of social commentary. It a meta-discussion purporting to show that people arguing the details of liscensing, copyright, patent, and "intellectual property" laws should pause, step back, and decide what behavior they are truly trying to encourage. Facts: ----- Laws are arbitrarily-created rules by which we structure our society. In this country, the people at large get to choose what rules they want to live by. In fact, the ability to arbitrarily create that very freedom was a keystone of motivation for the Europeans that settled in North America. A strong suspicion: ------------------ Laws are more "natural" and require less effort for people to comply with them when they follow the grain and style of what they regulate. Some examples: ------------- Laws describing the prohibition of chemicals (alcohol, cannabis, etc.) are "bad" because they don't work in practice. To repair these laws a new attitude could be adopted whereby drug use is considered a health problem rather than a crime. Sweden does this already. They save 90% of the money we spend treating the equivalent amount of drug symptoms by using a medical approach rather than a criminal one. Legally allowing the worship of your personal choice of deities is another arbitrary law. It happens to work very well. The patent laws are creating a big mess in the computer software industry right now because the time period they grant for a legal monopoly hasn't been updated to match current software-building practice. The laws aren't doing what they were originally designed to do (keep innovations from being lost to society as a whole) and instead are being used as a way to a keep business advantage to the detriment of society. The League for Programming Freedom has some suggested repairs for these arbitrarily-created laws, and they are far more eloquent than I am. Send me mail if you are curious. Thusly: ------ Laws relating to programming, copyrights, and digital media are as arbitrary as any other laws. They should be created to fill a specific need in a way that most people agree with. Laws relating to digital media will be more "natural" and require less effort for people to comply with them when they follow the grain and style of digital media. For instance, lawmakers have realized that XEROX copies are easy and cheap to make. They have responded by making small quantities of them containing copyrighted material legal. Nobody bothers to XEROX whole books - it's more expensive, and the final output is worse. However, lawmakers haven't yet recognized the ease of making exact digital copies. Therefore we have laws that try to prevent actions easy and natural to digital media users - and Prohibition didn't work for Alcohol, either. These laws were created to enforce (obsolete?) notions of "intellectual property". Conclusion: ---------- Perhaps we should stop discussing tweaks to old laws, accept that digital copying is immensely useful (if it wasn't useful people wouldn't do it) and here to stay, and form new laws that create an environment that society (and programmers) can benefit from more than the one we have now. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Brian Bartholomew UUCP: ...gatech!uflorida!beach.cis.ufl.edu!bb University of Florida Internet: bb@math.ufl.edu -- "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Brian Bartholomew UUCP: ...gatech!uflorida!beach.cis.ufl.edu!bb University of Florida Internet: bb@math.ufl.edu