Rental society

Posted Aug 15, 2008 15:18 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
In reply to: What's in a name by johnmark
Parent article: GeekPAC to fight for information rights

Because of the EULA's attached to consumable media, we don't actually own the content and thus have no rights to it, even though we paid for it.

This is self-contradictory. According to the beginning of the sentence, we didn't pay for the content; the end says we did. The statement makes it sound like we're getting less than we paid for, but doesn't provide any support for that.

The confused wording obscures the point. Is the point that people shouldn't have the right to "rent" the content (because it creates unwanted competition for other consumers) or that consumers are being misled and paying more/getting less than they intend?

Rental society

Posted Aug 15, 2008 19:26 UTC (Fri) by johnmark (guest, #47025) [Link] (1 responses)

The point is that we should have the protected right to access whatever information we've
legally obtained - via our method of choice. You may agree or disagree with that, but that's
one of our key points.

The follow-on to that is calculating the opportunity and innovation cost of *not* granting the
rights outlined above. This is impossible to calculate with any accuracy, unfortunately, which
hampers our ability to put this argument into terms like "impacts x% of GDP growth." Instead,
we have to appeal to people's sense of decency and back-of-the-napkin calculations. I like
appealing to people's sense of decency, but I would love to put together a more substantial
argument.

-John Mark
http://www.geek-pac.org/

Rental society

Posted Aug 16, 2008 17:40 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

The point is that we should have the protected right to access whatever information we've legally obtained - via our method of choice. You may agree or disagree with that, but that's one of our key points.

Well, I haven't agreed or disagreed because I still don't know what your point is. Originally, you had a self-contradiction, and now you have a tautology. It seems to me to say, "we should have the right to access whatever we have the right to access."

But you do add the thing about our method of choice. Is the point that we should be able to buy the right to access a piece of information either by every method or not at all? I.e. like existing product standard laws: you don't have to buy a television set, but if you do, it has to have all the channels, closed captioning, parental controls, etc.