What a load. Immoral? Prove it using any established moral code. Is it in the Bible? How about the Q'uran? Or the Torah? The Baghavad-Gita? Egyptian mythology? Zoroastrianism? In the precolonial social mores and religious traditions of any of the five hundred various Indian nations native to the American continent? Does Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Thoreau come out against it? Does the Buddha once speak of it? Is it mentioned anywhere in thousands of Zen Koans? Are there any tribal religions in Africa that cast aspersion on copying stories, songs, and artwork? Did the Inca and Maya curse the names of those who infringed copyright? Did Plato or Socrates or Pythagoras or Aristotle teach at length about this subject? Well? Huh?
Fact is, the very notion that songs, stories, ideas, images, and all the other ephemeralities restricted by "copyright" were for the bulk of human history passed along and shared only by active infringement by those who carried these works along for us later. Without copying we would have no folk songs, no scriptures, a great deal fewer plays, stories, paintings, buildings, inventions. Our cultural traditions would have lasted only as long as the material on which the first author ever fixed them-- in most cases less than 100 years.
Do you anti-copiers ever decry the vast body of commerce that exists in making copies of "public domain" works? Of course not. Ripping off the past is a hobby for the media cartel. Look at Disney with "The Little Mermaid", "Cinderella", "Snow White", "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", "Fantasia", etc. Look at movie releases like "Troy" and "Romeo & Juliet". Look at how often Beethoven, Bach, Tchaikovsky, and countless others have their works "stolen" and reused in contexts they could never have dreamed of. The same for Michelangelo, DaVinci, Monet, Manet. Where is your outrage at this?
via Slashdot.
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