Tuesday 4 October 2005

Surfing the High-Seas

You can tell life's become absurd when software predominantly used to break copyright, is itself copyrighted - In particular I refer to KaZaA (not that I'm using it... *cough*).

Kazaa's owners, Sharman Networks, had the ad-stripped Kazaa-Lite banned. They should know that if Kazaa-Lite is on "the network", they have no way of driving it into the ground (the ultimate irony). Even if file-sharing technology was banned, which looks increasingly possible but probably ineffective for the above reasons, there is still always the old-school way... disk-based shareware/freeware.

I remember the final few years of share/freeware; Test Drive II, Crystal Caves, Wolf 3D, Commander Keen; from my pre-10yo forays into Personal Computing. They just don't make DOS like they used to - to the extent that Win doesn't have real DOS anymore. Once the disk is out-there and endlessly-copied, you have a low-tech file-sharing network. Of course, this is comparing cup & string to e-mail.

Regardless, you can't stop people copying copyrighted material - we're not in the age of the first printing-press, we're in the age where everyone has the capability to publish and distribute. It's just that copyright is a relic of that age.

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