[d@DCC] Response to Globe Article on unauthorized downloading

[Sydney Weidman]

On Wed, 2005-08-10 at 16:58, Russell McOrmond wrote:
> Wallace J.McLean wrote:
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: Sydney Weidman <syd at plug.ca>
> > Date: Monday, August 8, 2005 5:52 pm
> > Subject: [d at DCC] Response to Globe Article on unauthorized downloading
> > 
> >>Sharing should not take place against the 
> >>will of copyright holders.
> > 
> > 
> > Why not?
> 
>    Because many of us would never create in the first place if someone 
> else set the terms of when and how things are "shared".  There are 
> different people in this forum that have different interests, and mine 
> is to protect creators' rights *FROM the backward thinking in Bill C-60, 
> not to take away creators' rights.
> 
> 
>    Where things fail badly in the current copyright debate is not 
> whether incentives are required for creativity, but the false suggestion 
> that all creators want the same incentives.  If all I had available to 
> me as a creator was a "right of remuneration" (Royalty payments, 
> monopoly rents, etc), then I would be no more likely to create than 
> Microsoft would be if the concept of a royalty fee was abolished.   We 
> each want to have our moral and material rights protected, but wish to 
> express them in totally different ways.
> 
>   I find what Microsoft/CAAST, CRIA, CMPDA and others are doing to be 
> entirely hypocritical given they are trying to revoke creators' rights 
> in the claimed name of protecting it.

Creators *do*, of course, have a range of motivations. I just understood
Wallace's post as referring to limits on the creator's right to
determine uses of a work, e.g. it is not an infringement for me to give
a reading of Miriam Toews' "A Complicated Kindness" to a gathering of
family and friends. The question "Why not" seemed to say: Hey, not
*every* form of sharing (even without the author's permission -- even
against their will) is forbidden. I guess P2P sharing is qualitatively
different in the sense that the sharing is no longer private.

It seems the more I say the less clear my ideas.

Regards,
Syd