DCML Digest, Vol 9, Issue 36

[Soeren Schridde]

Thanks to those that mentioned Gemstone comics being available at 
Amazon Europe!

Cord:

> Here in Germany to my knowledge:
(...)

Just a short correction:

In Germany, despite what the big music tries to inject into the 
people's brains by wrong repetition: 
Any "normal" private copy of music or film (not software) is legal. A 
wise government ages ago didn't want to criminalize half or more of 
the population... To compensate the artists for this, a flat fee is 
paid on all devices being able to record (even answer machines) and 
the income is distributed by an organisation ("GEMA"), which takes 
rather odd measures in that, but that's another topic...

haven't heard of the industry saying the GEMA should charge less as 
most DVDs and more and more CDs are copy-protected, though....
(applying their own argumentationonly where it fits their financial 
interests...)

translating EU law, it just shot time ago became illegal to 
circumvene "effective" copy protection or to use sources that are 
obviously illegal - the Kazaas etc. are (only) in the discussion. 
(No "great invention" like a software that can be surpassed by 
disabling windows autostart like in US would suffice, and of course 
not allow those creators to sue those that post that "secret" in the 
net ...)

Besides that, ONLY PROFESSIONALS who want to make money are punished 
for circumvening... 

No difference between digital and analog copying in Germany...

Anhow, I'm happy that usual comics are just too cheap that it would 
be worth xeroxing most of them...

But to get it finally on topic:
With music, I enjoy my whole collection as MP3 (self-encoded!) on my 
Harddisk and using the Winamp-shuffle (playlist with ALL my mp3s).

Can you imagine using a story-viewer on the PC that puts the stories 
on screen by chance / shuffled? One might find some great stories 
lurking in the dephts of one's collection... :-))

Soeren
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Stader Str. 206, 21075 Hamburg, Germany
eMail: sschridde at web.de  (2nd: sschridde at gmx.de)