We need someone young, naive, with stars in their eyes
going gaga over internet fame about a website they'll
never have any creative input on, unless they swear a
blood oath to never take credit for an idea that already
aligns with our PG rated middle school sense of humor.
This is an interesting new wrinkle for me, when it comes to intellectual property. In this case the benevolent anarchy of the old axiom "information wants to be free" rings less true.
This one feels dangerously close to the classic power struggle between underdog music artists and the rotten record labels that have a habit of steam-rolling over their creative sensibilities so they can bastardize an artistic work in the name of selling more spaghetti sauce.
This whole intellectual property thing has always, always, ALWAYS been about the individual's fight against the slippery oligarchy of private companies and corporations. It's almost impossible to paint a corporation as the poor, defenseless victim. The Beastie Boys, in this respect are more individualistic than the company.
In this case the Beastie Boys are not sell-outs. Their position rings truest.
It's funny to see this slight change in power differential augment the perception of the conflict. Does this mean that information wants to be free, if and only if it's being freed into the hands of a private individual and not a faceless profiteering company? Yeah, kind of.
Sorry, EFF. You are pretty much entirely wrong on this one.
The thing that sucks about web mail is that when your browser closes, you might never see any of your messages again.
Let's say you get fired, due to a blazing inferno of inter-office politics at IniTrode. Let's say you are wrongfully fired. Let's say there was a damning e-mail sitting in your inbox to prove it.
Whoops! When you got fired, you lost access to your e-mail login. All your mail sits server-side now, and you have no proof of your transgression.
With an IMAP client, you can stay in the habit of retaining a stale cache of messages on your local machine. But if you drop that habit, in favor of a web interface, well ...beware of political lightning strikes. You might find yourself the victim of a lockout.
Everything disappears with a lost login, when it comes to the web interface. Not so with traditional e-mail clients.
Okay. Yeah, we get it. That's great. We get it. The fat man has a website, and it's very bad. He's a fat, ugly, stinky man. Boo hoo! Make him go away!
I'm still not clear on what it is about his website, and all the implicit data transfer it's responsible for, that's so radically different from any other website that hosts massive amounts of any data I want, shared with the world.
Flickr, for example, let's me share Terabytes of data, if I should choose to do so. Why isn't flickr villified like some genocidal dictator?
> Flickr, for example, let's me share Terabytes of data, if I should choose to do so. Why isn't flickr villified like some genocidal dictator?
Mostly because movie studios have more lobbyists and PR flacks than still photographers.
Also, Hollywood does vilify the various other websites. YouTube is an evil pirate website which Viacom has had to sue to vindicate its rights, didn't you know? And a couple of YouTube founders watched a Hollywood movie someone uploaded to YouTube that one time, so therefore Google should have to shut down YouTube and pay a billion dollars.
What is your counter-argument to the fact that he turned "on us" in the past when he gave all information on users of the House of Coolness BBS to the authorities, the lawyer Günter Freiherr von Gravenreuth, and just about anyone who would pay?
I fail to see the difference between your complaint and the reality of all large tech companies, as we now know them to be. Secret agreements for wire taps and traffic analysis. National security letters and eavesdropping. Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft. All of them.
I say again: Why is this guy more evil than anyone else? Why is he worse than, say, Steve Ballmer? Why is he smeared, but other corporate parasites, not so much?
To me, Kim Dotcom's activities are reminiscent of one of those villain crossover movies -- Alien vs. Predator or whatever. I don't bear Dotcom much good will, but if he damages the copyright maximalists while they're taking him down, I'm happy to see that.
