OT: Re: DRM and the PRO-IP Act - Limited time opportunity? Shameless self-promotion?

[Leo Mauler]

--- On Sun, 9/28/08, James R. Sissel <JimSissel at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Leo, you must be one of those bigot, racist, hateful,
> evil-rich Republicans.

You don't have to be a Republican to laugh at someone who signed a contract without reading the whole thing.

> People taking personal responsibility?  Bah!  What 
> horrible ideas you are presenting.  Why, if they 
> have to do that for their music then what's next?  
> Actually pay their mortgages or suffer the  
> consequences?

Yes, Wall Street should have to suffer the same consequences for their equally foolish expenditure of money.  Seems the richer you get, the more fiscally-irresponsible you get because you know, deep down, that Daddy Government will step in to refill your bank account should your wasteful and foolish spending ever catch up with you.  Joe Average has no such assurance.

Someone who was a member of the 1980s S&L scandals' "Keating Five" (like JOHN MCCAIN, the only member of the "Keating Five" still in the U.S. Senate) shouldn't be put in charge of financial decisions like the Wall Street bailout.  The remaining fox being put in charge of the financial henhouse.

> I think we need a bailout for the disenfranchised 
> music people.  The government should buy new 
> DRM-filled music for them with taxpayer's money.  
> After all, isn't that the moral thing to do?

Seems the "right and proper" thing to do, after watching the U.S. Government agree to pay off Wall Street's "American Excess Card" payments, would be for the U.S. government to buy all of the DRM-ed music from the consumers, without much more than a "slap on the wrist" penalty to the consumers, and let them continue to make DRM mistakes with their new money.

> At 10:22 AM 9/28/2008 -0700, you wrote:
> > Much as I might try to sympathize with these 
> > folks, I don't have a lot of sympathy for 
> > someone who bought into a system which
> > basically told them "we don't want you to 
> > freely listen to music you buy from us" and 
> > now is being denied the ability to freely 
> > listen to the music they bought.
> >
> > Rather, a big "we told you so" needs to go
> > out from the anti-DRM folks to all those 
> > people who thought that being denied the
> > right to freely listen to their own music 
> > would /never/ result in them being denied 
> > the right to freely listen to their own 
> > music *at all*.
> >
> > People bought into DRM (and read their T&Cs,
> > right?) and now are getting *exactly what 
> > they paid for*.  Its the free market in
> > action: an informed public read their T&C 
> > (thus the informed part) and still agreed to 
> > buy music which could be taken away from them 
> > at any moment without a refund of the purchase 
> > price.  Caveat emptor and similar Latin
> > warnings.