Re: [Cdn-DMCA] Fwd: [Upd-discuss] Position paper on keeping limits to copyright? [andyo@oreilly.com]

From: Russell McOrmond <russell _-at-_ flora.ca>
To: No DMCA in Canada <canada-dmca-opponents (at) flora.org>
Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2002 22:39:16 -0500 (EST)

On Tue, 15 Jan 2002, Fergal Warde wrote:

> Hi everyone, I'm new to this list.. I'm a high school student who sees a 
> very dim future in terms of civil liberties especially online.. Anyway..

  I went into a high-school class this last semester to talk about these
very issues.  The class saw the movie "Anti-Trust" and then I came in as
an example of an "Open Source" (Really, Free Software) consultant.  I
spoke mostly about the politics surrounding computing.

  Your pessimism was shared by the students in that class. I have been
told by my high-school teaching wife (Biology teacher) is in fact a very
common thing in people of high-school age.

  I will actually be going to a teachers Professional Development day in
February to talk to some of the local science/tech teachers about these
issues.


  We can't continue to say things like "which has a snowball's chance in
hell of happening", we must simply make it happen.  There is no utility in
giving up, and the only way to effect positive change is to believe you
can and march forward.  Being young you haven't yet experienced any of the
successes of a campaign you were involved in, but you can look at what
others have witnessed.


  When I was in early University I first discovered gnu.misc.discuss, and
was around to witness the debate with then-unknown Linus Torvalds about
what type of license he should use for his new minix-clone.

  I watched things grow from that nothingness to the huge visibility of
Linux, BSD and the GNU system today.


  The balance of Copyright/Patents/etc has been an ongoing debate for
quite some time. The fact that the debate is at the level of SSSCA (IE:
user programmable computers would be illegal, programmers would need to be
bonded, computer science classes closed) indicates to me that we are
partly winning the battle.  They wouldn't be asking to try to destroy the
foundations of free market economics in a post-Industrial economy unless
they recognized that this change was a considerable threat to their
corporate-feudalistic interests.

  Our job should never be seen as trying to convince the Disney or the
Microsoft's of the world of anything - they are simply the outdated feudal
lords of the past.  Our job is to point out to the general public the
advances we as a society can make by moving forward away from such
nonsense.

---
 Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/>
 See http://weblog.flora.org/ for announcements, activities, and opinions
 "If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise,
  we don't believe in it at all." -- Noam Chomsky

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