http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Wha
"They felt Jesus would not have approved of copyright breaches."
Jesus you da man! Stick it to those kids!
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- shlomif : Jesus and Copyrights [+4]
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It's high time people understood that copying copyrighted works is not "stealing" or "theft" or whatever. The difference is that with theft of tangible goods, the person has one less copy of the work, while with copying digitial media the original is left intact.
As for Jesus: Jesus was a hallucinating schizophrenic. It is hard to tell how much of the New Testament is true or how much of what Jesus supposedly said are not later additions. (I read in Time Magazine that there are researchers who concluded he may have said at most one sentence out of the sermon on the Mount.). He was also not unique at his time, and did not achieve much success at his lifetime. Furthermore, he may have survived the cross, because keeping a person hanged on a cross for several hours was a common Roman punishment.
A final note is that Christianity was not a spin-off of Judaism, but rather a cult of Pagan Roman Priests who only later adopted the gospel of Jesus as its leader.
Perhaps we should call it 'obtaining financial advantage by deception' instead. Since that doesn't roll off the tongue, lets call it theft instead.
Which everyone instantly understands, even if it isn't quite correct.
Whatever you call it, calling it theft or stealing is wrong, because it's not really theft or stealing.
I'm a bit more relaxed about calling these things piracy, even though I realize that today's file/software traders are not anything like the see-faring robbers who pillaged ships, raped the women, killed everybody, and then burned and drowned the ships.
You might be interested to note that the students had studied "Exodus 20:15 - you shall not steal" which comes a little way before Jesus anyway. Wasn't the whole point of Jesus coming to make the "new commandment" that people "love one another as I have loved you" and to annul the previous commandments that were given to Moses? I was raised Christian and was Christian for a long time but now am not, but I can't quite remember the specifics of this point.
Anyway, the point is that Jesus probably would have told them to stick Exodus to the man and just get on with the lovin'. Or something.
Don't know what Jesus would have said. Like I said, I believe even Jesus barely knew what he was talking about most of the time. I have little belief in the Ethics of the Old Testament, and much less in the one of the New Testament (I'm a Jewish Atheist Objectivist, and Jewish Atheists arguably beat the hell out of Gentile atheists. ;-)).
As far as my pretty rusty knowledge of religion goes you are probably correct. As for Jesus, he did advocate "love your brother", etc. however, he also advocated people feeling guilt for their own feelings, which is a nice way to put guilt into everybody because everybody feels lust, anger, hatred, etc. sometimes. A man has no immediate control of his own feelings and thoughts, and should not feel guilty for having them.
See also this piece I wrote for a nice mock-up of what Jesus supposedly said in the Sermon on the Mount.
#1 I think the RIAA is a bunch of stupid idiots who milk musicians for all they are worth.
#2 From another standpoint, I am kinda against Kazaa. A musician makes a song, and then it's copied thousands of times so that everyone has a free copy? Where does that leave the musician? Unable to support himself through music and therefore
#3 If you don't like the RIAA, using Kazaa isn't the answer. Simply don't buy any CDs. Jesus also said, "Render unto Ceaser, that which is Ceaser's." Basically, if something belongs to someone, then give it to them. To this route, I won't buy any music produced by the RIAA, until they clean up their act.
If a musician were smart, they'd bypass the RIAA, release some free samples on Kazaa, with notes attached that if you like the music and want to hear more, then here is where you can buy more. I'd like to see more musicians get a boost from Kazaa, and have them rise to stardom outside of the RIAA.
2 - Granted, however even when I download songs, I can't feel too bad, after all, I cost the musician a couple of cents at best. That's not even worth the cost of mailing them the money. Now this isn't an excuse for copying the music, but it is a reason why I don't feel bad about it.
3 - Or buy stuff outside the RIAA's grasp. There is a lot of awesome music out there on the internets, from wacky internet savvy bands (ie: Trocadero) to what has grown out of the old demoscene (ie: Paniq). Now, if you're an incredible content eating machine, you probably want more music than this, but it's still a good start. And some (not a lot, but some) is better than what you get from the RIAAamaphone.
RIAA etc. are a bunch of dorks. Yep.
RIAA doesn't understand their market very well. Definitely.
The RIAA also either doesn't understand how easy it is to bypass copyright enforcement (i.e. Digital Rights Management) or if they do, are under some sort of mistaken understanding that they just have to keep improving the enforcement technology and eventually they'll hit on one that works.
I'm against Kazaa etc. for the reason that it sucks for musicians, but then the reason it sucks for musicians is because the music industry sucks for musicians, because it's stuck in the archaic times of pre-internet-ness. So I'm vaguely for Kazaa in that it may end up bringing the music industry around to being sensible about it, though so far it's only proved to make the music industry dumb (see the paragraph above). Good things that have come out that will improve the situation are things like the iTunes Music Store, providing good value downloadable music.
Also Kazaa sucks these days, I don't actually think I've downloaded much from it or any other mp3 downloady thing in a while. I did get involved with that Russian site a little while back though.
The thing about MP3 sharing is that it's easy to do. I don't see why the music industry doesn't jump in on this and latch onto the iTunes Music Store idea (particularly here in Australia, where it's been held back for a year or so due to the stupid record companies bickering), especially because those usual downloaders who have credit cards and a conscience would definitely go to it. (I'd like to consider myself one of those people, and I know others who would to.) What about those lazy high school kids with lots of time but no money? Gift cards work for book shops, why not for online music stores too? None of this is new, but it's new in the sense that noone really has picked up on it and marketed the hell out of it, instead they use scare tactics like the RIAA's sueing (suing? bleh) of multiple random Joes in the States to make examples of people.
Anyway the thing that struck me about this article is the imposing of religion onto the subject. What would Jesus do? It's somewhat presumptuous of one to second guess God in my humble opinion... I'd prefer him to work in "mysterious ways". That said, however, he sounded like a down-to-earth tree-hugging Mac-using hippy to me so I'm sure he'd have some back catalogue of Jethro Tull or someone hanging around his neck on his iShuffle. But that's okay, article writers and subjects, just keep on piling on the guilt!