There's been some recent discussion of ethics and markets relating to copyright prompted by the Orwellian sounding overtones of the latest Microsoft powergrab. Seems about time to replay my periodic reminder that copyright is not a black-and-white moral issue, it is merely a societal convention which given public appetites for file sharing, and extreme difficulty of preventing the public continuing apace (kazaa has some millions of users online, with 2 peta-bytes of shared files and growing), it seems to me that the natural evolution of laws etc would be for the laws surrounding copyright be revoked as out-dated and no longer applicable in an era of digital copying. Without this adjustment reality and content distribution laws are getting increasingly out-of-synch, which is going to lead to some probable very undesirable side effects in more laws further tilting the playing field in the favor of the big media cartels, and starting to lead to very draconian and Orwellian systems enforced under force of law. Copyright is effectively a massive corporate welfare program to the benefit of the media cartels at this point. It's a business model protection racket with the government providing the thugs at no expense to the business. No wonder the businesses that benfit from this want to lobby to maintain this free enforcement corporate welfare handout. They get the financial benefits, and don't care about the negative societal implications, such as described in Stallmann's prescient essay on the long term implications of the coming brawl. I don't see that the media cartels -- the main short-term benefactors and lobbyists of the current and rapidly expanding copyright laws have any moral right to have these conventions and corporate welfare continue. If society just said no, which it would appear of the internet population they largely are, I think it likely we'd still have movies, music etc., and that artists would continue to make money and businesses associated with managing artists works would also make money; the landscape might look a little different but so what. Also, even if one type of business model or content was no longer economically supported, I can't see how that's a loss, or a bad thing -- if there is no economic, coercion free model where a business can provide service to end-users who want that service, then by definition that service should not exist. Many of the existing methods of capitalising on content remain without copyright: - convenience (if copies on physical media are competitively priced vs peoples time to source and download), - advertising (compete for placing in order of user preferred downloads) - live events - higher spec projection equipment (movie theatre vs home viewing) - branding - reliability, certified quality (guarantees of download speed, bit-rate, resolution audio quality) So I say scrap copyright now, and let the market sort out which business models and distribution comapnies surive which new business models emerge, and then we can avoid the Orwellian power-grab which will have many freedom destroying and negative societal costs. Adam -- http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/