"If you didn't pay for it, you've stolen it!"

[Tim May]

On Friday, October 24, 2003, at 08:14  AM, Harmon Seaver wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 23, 2003 at 10:43:22PM -0700, Tim May wrote:
>>
>> TM: the last two paragraphs were of course added by me. But the point
>> is still valid, that much of Hollywood's claims about "illegal
>> listening" are not really any different from "reading without buying"
>> books and magazines in libraries. The more urgent issue is this crap
>
>    Not to mention all the CDs and movies available in libraries. 
> What's the
> difference in borrowing CDs from a library and taking them home and 
> taping or
> mp3ing them and getting them from the net?

None, and in fact I have made my own DAT and CD copies of many hundreds 
of CDs I borrowed.

I also burn an average one DVD per day, of movies and suchlike.

>> about corporations buying time in public schools. If I had a kid in a
>> school and it was proposed that Nike, Time-Warner, Coke, or Intel 
>> would
>> be buying teaching time, I'd tell them to stop it pretty fucking quick
>> or face the Mother of All Columbines.
>
>    Or even worse the practice of Coke, Pepsi, et al paying money to 
> the school
> for exclusive rights to market their product. Also sort of like what 
> M$ did in
> schools and colleges -- gave them some free computers on the condition 
> that all
> competing software be removed from computer labs. Not surprising at 
> all that
> megacorps now want to buy teaching time in schools. In Japan the 
> megacorp have
> long run their own schools for workers kids to ensure the loyalty of 
> their
> future workers.

This last point I have no problem with, provided Megacorp pays all the 
costs for its own schools. In fact, I support bringing back indentured 
servitude.

The problem is when a "public school," which taxpayers have been 
ordered to pay for, becomes the fiefdom of a corporation. If a child is 
compelled to attend school, as he is, he may not be compelled to watch 
commercials or listen to corporate pitches.


--Tim May
"Dogs can't conceive of a group of cats without an alpha cat." --David 
Honig, on the Cypherpunks list, 2001-11