a dangerous man replies to Stefan

[john garvin]

Well, you can't complain that the list is boring anymore, eh?  In some ways this is going to sound like a personal attack, but I assure you it is not.  I'm responding to the ideas present, not the person.

Stefan:
"It's like some people believe that just because they own a computer, they have a right to get
everything else in the world for free."

What computers, and the internet, have done are to make it possible for people to share information (even information with full color pictures and sound) with each other for free.  All modern revolutions begin with some technological breakthrough.  The protestant revolution could never have happened without the printing press (which enabled average people to afford and read the bible, who
previously had to accept the word of Catholic priests as to its contents.)  The industrial revolution could not have happened without the invention of steam powered mechanical production.  Copyright law has its roots in 18th century printing presses.  There is no way it will withstand the pressures of the internet age.

"On this list, I've been amazed to see people continuously advertising fully
scanned Disney stories for anyone to read or download. An illustrated fan site
is one thing, and should be applauded if it's well maintained, yet I
thought it should be obvious to anyone that complete stories are way too much. I've been
wondering how they can to this and why somebody doesn't stop them, or even
politely tell them this is a thoughtless thing to do."

Don't forget that under the strict letter of copyright law, and illustrated fan site is NOT acceptable.  Lucas Arts, when internet usage first started exploding, actually tried to shut down every fan site it could find.  That turned into a fruitless enterprise.  Try this experiment: make a fanzine and liberally illustrate it with Disney copyrighted chracters and images, then mail a copy of
it to Disney and see what they say.  They forbade John Nichols from using them in the Barks Collector, and that was a quasi scholarly fanzine.  Posting a full story is not a thoughtless act, and your suggestion that it is seems rather insulting and condescending.  Here's something to think about:  I remember in the 1960s kids in our neighborhood would get a comic, read it, and pass it on
to their friends.  Every individual comic sold was ready by a hundred different kids or more.  Were they breaking the copyright law?  In many ways, the internet is a virtual playground.

 "Tomorrow I'll walk into the jewellers' and take a diamond
bracelet. I'm not gonna sell it, so I'm not making a profit from it. I'm
giving it to my girlfriend, who wouldn't have bought it otherwise, and the store has
lots of other bracelets anyway, so nobody loses anything. Yes, this situation
is different, but the argument is the same. And how about this: "The Internet
is a free medium. Nobody can stop us, so we can do whatever we want." (Or
similar.) Well, this is very, very naïve at best."

This is a sloppy argument and not at all the same.  No one is suggesting that you walk into a store and steal a comic off the shelf.  In that case, the comic is a physical product, just like a box of soap or a woven rug.  But your argument shows how little you understand the information age.  The comic "book" is a product.  But what is it really?  There were tens of thousand comic books
printed in the 40s and 50s, but you don't find fan sites devoted to very many of them.  Yet the Barks stories are collected and shared all over the world.  Why?  Because of their content.  The ideas in them.  The characters and stories, all unique to Carl Barks.  Without the ideas and imagination of a creator like Barks, the comic book is just so much paper:  the publisher has nothing to
publish, the printer has nothing to print, the distributor has nothing to distribute, the bookstore has nothing to sell, and yes, the translator has nothing to translate.

The fact that an average person can scan a full color image, post it to a website, and have it instantly available to millions of other people, bypassing all those people, is revolutionary, not naive, very or otherwise.

"Otherwise, it wouldn't be hard to think of several other, less
flattering attributes for people with this kind of opinions. "Dangerous" would
be one of the more neutral."

Revolutions are only "dangerous" to those profiting from the status quo.

"But, as has been pointed out, and needs to be pointed out again: Information and art is not the same thing, I repeat NOT the same thing. Granted, the boundaries may be blurry at times, but
most of the time it should be pretty clear-cut what one could do or not. And publishing complete Disney comic stories is a very clear "not". I think it's outrageous!"

The world of ideas is the world of ideas, I see no distinction between art and information.


"Finally: John Garvin's vision of the future really scares me. I'm not prophet
enough to tell whether it will come true or not, but I believe, for reasons
stated many times recently by wise contributors to this list, that we all
would
do well to try to prevent it for as long as we could. Ah well, so far, so bad.
But when John says things like:
>
>  It is a human
> right to break a bad law. If enough people do it, the laws get swept away.

I even get scared of the man himself. From such convictions stem movements
that
I don't want to discuss on this list, or anywhere else, for that matter. I
can't believe that John deep down inside really means that, and wants to
preach
the message to others. Hopefully, he just enjoys some rhetoric drama. Why,
some
of the other things he says actually makes good sense to me! But if he does
mean what he says above... well, I can only hope that none of his friends ever
get into their heads that any law protecting my personal safety is a bad one."

What I'm about to say may sound controversial and offensive, so fair warning.

I mean exactly what I say:  It is a human right, moreover, a human responsibility, to break bad laws.  Perhaps you are afraid because you don't trust people to know the difference between bad laws and good ones.  I have more faith than that.  I'm not sure what "movements" you are talking about, but modern history is full of examples of bad laws and bad governments being overturned by
people who were not afraid to break the law:

Nelson Mandella spent almost his entire life in prison in South Africa because he refused to follow the unjust laws of Apartheid.  Yes I'm sure there were many wealthy whites in position of power who were afraid about the revolutionary changes that happened in that country.

Martin Luther King spent much of his life in jail because he refused to obey the unjust Jim Crow laws of the American South.  Yes I'm sure there were many wealthy whites in position of power who were afraid about the revolutionary changes that happened in the south.

How many people were persecuted by the unjust laws of Stallinist Russia, Nazi Germany, Communist East Germany, Zionist Israel, Milosovich's Yugoslavia?  You may think I'm exaggerating by equating these copyright issues with such great dramas of the human struggle for equality, but I think they are related, on two levels:

First, it is fear of "the law" that allows such unjust laws to flourish.  You are not afraid of John Garvin "the man" you are afraid of upsetting the status quo.  It is people like you who "look the other way" when the rights of others are abused that allowed regimes like those in South Africa to exist, and others like the Facism to sweep across Eastern and Western Europe, people who were
to cowardly to stand up for what was right, or who were profiting from the system and didn't want to see it fail.

Second, it is the control of information that makes these human abuses so easy.  The first thing a despotic government tries to do when it comes to power is take over the printing presses, TV stations, radio airwaves so they can control access to information.  The internet represents the free access to all information.

Media corporations have had it pretty good until now.  They could pay artistic geniuses starvation wages while they reaped millions from their labor.  The comic publishing industry is especially guilty of this:

a.  How much money do you think Carl Barks made for Western Publishing and the Disney Corporation?  Carl saw none of this until he started doing oil paintings in his 70s and 80s, and Disney even tried to take that away from him.

b. How much money did Superman make National Periodicals?  Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel died in near poverty.

c. How much money did Dan DeCarlo make Harvey Publications?  They just fired him for standing up for his claim to characters he created.

d.  How much money have the various publishers of Don Rosa's "Life of Scrooge" stories made?  How much of that does Don get?  None.

While such exploitation is certainly legal, it is NOT moral or right.  And corporations who routinely exploit others certainly do not get sympathy from me when they use an army of lawyers to protect intellectual property they have "stolen" in the first place.  An information revolution is coming.  Your blind fear of it, won't stop it.

And for the record: I don't think anyone on this list is "thoughtless" or "naive" or particularly "dangerous."  Such name calling is not conducive to the free exchange of ideas.