Any restriction by government of the travel of a person who is harming nobody is oppression.  I have a natural right to wander where I please – so long as I harm no one – and other people’s ugly cowardice and xenophobia are not valid reasons to impede me in any way.

Less than one hundred years ago, the majority of people in the United States felt exactly as I do about this.  Yet today, passports are taken for granted…  no slave may leave the latifundia until their hereditary masters have approved a formal plea, as shown by the award of a “passport” certificate by said masters.

Imagine if all the effort, time, money, and human resources put into violating copyright were directed to artists and creators — we’d be living in a new Renaissance.

Imagine if all the effort, time, money, and human resources that goes to industry bigwigs and lobbying groups went to artists and creators; that would give artists and creators far more money than draconian copyright laws.  And FYI – there’s far more creativity going on now than there was in the Renaissance.

The issue is with the lawmakers, who supposedly protect the public interest. Suddenly, the public servants are serving the morality-free businessman-villain, while still having all the power given to them by the public trust. It’s like your children’s babysitter giving your children heroin and then pimping them out because her gang-boss pays more than you do. 

Public servants who have proven corrupted need to be replaced with ones deserving of the tremendous trust given to them. Jail would be nice, too.

And, of course, ISPs which provide paid service to end users would have no say whatsoever about the content of the rented “pipes” and no job censoring their paying users’ activities.

It is my hope that the free market will not tolerate the increasingly aggressive diminishing of service quality in this area. We may be reaching a point when it may be profitable to install new infrastructure in order to sell a qualitatively better service at a premium.

Another possibility is that we’ll see VPN services becoming more popular.

People like their roads to be maintained, their schools funded, their social institutions working, and so on. Nobody likes paying income tax, and we may not like some of the things it pays for. But you like a whole lot of what it pays for.

Passports serve as an identification at state borders, and they are directly related to the idea of borders. When things go well between states (such as is the case between US states, EU states etc.) borders are not necessairy, and people find identification and control a hindrance. But when things don’t go well, people tend to find the idea comforting that there is some control over who gets to cross the border. It’s again something people depending on the circumstance support.

An oppressive government however does not deliver any tangible or perceived benefit.

Actually, for my money apportioning a percentage of people’s Internet fee to go to the copyright holders of the files they download would be a fine solution.  Beats the hell out of lawsuits and the threat of disconnection.

Course, then the problem becomes monitoring people’s downloads without making a tremendous piracy overreach, and verifying that those numbers are legit and not somebody attempting to game the system.

But still and all, those would be better problems than the current lawsuit/censorship regime.

It’s utterly trivial — create a site or program that automatically adds a random string of characters to an MP3′s metadata, and hashes become totally useless as a way of identifying a file.

A free man used to be  able to cross any national boundary of his own free will, and should he commit no crime, nothing would happen to him.

The US federal government used to be prevented from taxing private income. That revenue stream was restricted to the states, on the assumption that citizens should have a strong local voice in taxation in a free nation.

I think most people now believe passports and income tax are “ordinary”, don’t you?

I like to think that having royalties be inherited by the children of the original artist means that the media companies are less likely to arrange accidents in order to save themselves some payments.

They go on and on about how important they are, and yet themselves pay as little as possible to the Governments they want to “save” them.

Every new idea they have to “protect” their business model depends on 1 things.
Imposing it as a cost to the users.
They want everyone else to protect their copyrights, claiming they are losing kajillions. 
Compared to kajillions wouldn’t the cost of offering this service seem like a savings?

This is about them trying to keep their business model the same as it always was and it really is time people start pointing out how much money is being spent on behalf of an industry they doesn’t even pay that much in taxes to enjoy such a favored position.

The legislation to take away encryption will be a bit of a challenge to pass.

Where can I sign up for this security? I want some of that in my line of work. Who do I bribe?

If creators want security, they should do work. House painters want security as well, so they have to keep painting houses. Garbagemen keep collecting garbage. Programmers keep programming. This is the only security they can get. Somehow, because music/film has emotional value – mostly marketing: rock star status! – we give them a lot of breaks. They can get away with a monopoly. They get the police to protect their work. And now you’re claiming they need this security?

Copyright has gone from stimulating creators to create to stimulating suits to grab. Terms are ridiculous: decades after the creator has died, his children are still collecting royalties. How is the original creator supposed to create anything after he’s dead?

The entertainment industry could use bittorrent technology to deliver content. This makes bittorrent a useful technology, so the effort, time and money that went into “violating copyright” is at least partially being used to create useful technology. Useful even to the copyright owners.

On the other hand, the big labels are creating nothing of worth. What’s more, they are destroying value for artists and consumers alike by virtue of them being a huge middle man where we can get away with a thin service layer nowadays.

Technology went ahead and created the future. Big content is holding on to the past. Who do you think is going to win?

Imagine if all the effort, time, money, and human resources put into violating copyright were directed to artists and creators — we’d be living in a new Renaissance.

But the intentions are good, right? What could go wrong?

As I see it, there is a copyright war going on with each side escalating. The music industry could have solved the problem early on by working with Napster instead of suing it out of existence. They had a second chance with Grokster and sued it, and a few others out of existence. All of that led to the emergence of bittorrent and decentralization of file sharing. It seems that the music industry hasn’t learned. Escalation is not the answer. They can force ISPs to search for a signature, but the battle will escalate through the use of scrambling, encryption and compression.

I see encypted proxies in Japan’s future.

Piracy here is still widely shunned even by young Japanese and I’m sure world’s recording industry robber-barons see it as their last stand. 

The insipid appeals they print on the bottom of music promo posters is disheartening. Lightly translated, “Think about it! If you download a song, the cycle will be broken and artists will never make music again!”

Yes, as much as it pains me to say, in a largely rule driven society, people are going to accept such claims at face value.