Copyright and Intellectual property (was OT: Music)

["John Locke" <mail -at- freelock -dot- com>]

For a different view on Napster, the recording industry, and piracy, check
out what Courtney Love has to say:
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/index.html. Sounds like
not all artists feel that Napster cuts into their profits...

Quite a few artists, in fact, seem to think that Napster provides a vehicle
for getting their music out to audiences that would not hear it otherwise,
due to the stranglehold of the recording industry on distribution... and
letting their music out for free leads to more sales, not less...

To steer this back on topic, the whole issue of copyright seems to be going
through quite an upheaval... it's interesting to note that copyright has its
origins not in protecting the rights of the artist, but in providing a
government-sanctioned monopoly for a limited time, as incentive for people
to create works that will end up in the public domain. Funny how that's
gradually changed over the centuries to the present 75 years after the death
of the creator...

Steve Read writes, regarding intellectual property:
> I dunno about anyone else, but that's about all I have to sell.
> Therefore, I
> don't steal it from others.

I tend to see things the same way, buying software/music/books rather than
obtaining pirated versions. However, with the Open Source movement, Steven
King making his new book available for a voluntary fee,
Napster/Gnutella/other software making music copyrights unenforceable, I
think we're in for some big changes.

Anybody care to make any predictions? How relevant is copyright to what we
do every day?

John Locke
http://www.freelock.com