Is Copyright Law The New Prohibition?

from the try-to-avoid-that dept

Declan McCulllough's latest column talks about how the debate over copyright issues is getting louder on all sides. He discusses a few of the different challenges to current copyright law, and then compares copyright law to Prohibition, explaining that setting up laws where the punishment doesn't even remotely fit the crime isn't likely to help anything. All it really does is turn more perfectly good citizens into federal criminals. It also increases a disrespect for the law. McCullough hopes that politicians realize this and don't make any stupid decisions on copyright law, and instead try to fix some of the problems with existing copyright laws and "square them with reality".
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  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 14 Oct 2002 @ 8:42pm

    ignorant of history

    It's funny to see people think that just because
    they want something they can have it (eventually).

    There are a lot of federal crims that have
    pushments that don't fit the crime. Governments
    are strange like that.

    Prohibition is just probably 1 of 10 things that
    the people were able to take back in any given
    time period/era and as every cop knows an average
    person going about their boring average daily
    life probably violates at least 5 laws in a day.

    As technology improves the ability to prosecute
    those violations, this will become more and more
    obvious.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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