re: #424 buzzsawmonkey

Yes…”fared use,” as I once heard it referred to. I know it puts some people’s backs up, but I haven’t ever heard a coherent explanation why.

Here’s something to think about; it guarantees the rightsholder an income, which enables the rightsholder to lower his/her price for access. And if it is applied to works in the public domain…well, there’s a problem, but here’s another one; if you don’t pay for works, nobody has any interest in preserving them, and the public domain becomes useless.

That’s “Fair Use”, which is actually the principle that we each get to use parts of copyrighted works in our own writing, so long as that use is limited, germane, and indispensable.

I greatly dislike DRM schemes because something necessary *on the way* to those schemes is for me to lose a great deal of control over my computer. Microsoft’s “Trusted Computing initiative” is marketed as some sort of virus protection business, but it’s DRM and it works like a scheme to replace all of the plumbing in your house with living intestines, so that every damned inch of it must come from the same source, or the whole thing collapses. These idiots will drive Linux into prominence, bless their black little hearts, and they’re ging to be oblivious until that tipping point where one more blunder like Office 2007 or Windows Vista pegs the BS-meters on a generation of IT folks and the bosses who just once in a while, take the recommendations offered.