You can dismiss pirates as just being greedy and surely able to pay if they wanted, just as you could dismiss the colonist tea drinkers as greedy bastards who surely could afford to pay the tax on their English tea. And in doing so, you’d be missing the point entirely, choosing to grotesquely mischaracterize a situation in order to stay comfortable but ignorant.
“But the Boston Tea Party was about taxation without representation!”, some would say. “The copyright monopoly issue is different!”
Is it, really?
Really?
Let’s review the facts at hand. The copyright monopoly laws were constructed to benefit the public, and the public only. In the U.S. Constitution, we can read clearly that the purpose of the copyright monopoly is “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts”. Nothing more, nothing less.
Michael Sauers is the Director of Logan Library in Logan, UT. Prior to this he was one of the founding staff and Technology Manager for Do Space in Omaha, NE. After earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany's School of Information Science and Policy Michael spent his first 20 years as a librarian training other librarians in technology along with time as a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, a technology consultant, and a bookseller. He has written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and has published 14 books ranging from library technology, blogging, Web design, and an index to a popular horror magazine. In his spare time, he blogs at TravelinLibrarian.info, runs The Collector's Guide to Dean Koontz website at CollectingKoontz.com, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.
Unless otherwise stated, all opinions are my own and are not to be considered those of the City of Logan, UT.
View all posts by Michael Sauers
You can dismiss pirates as just being greedy and surely able to pay if they wanted, just as you could dismiss the colonist tea drinkers as greedy bastards who surely could afford to pay the tax on their English tea. And in doing so, you’d be missing the point entirely, choosing to grotesquely mischaracterize a situation in order to stay comfortable but ignorant.
