DRM News

An essay titled ‘Is it OK to download music, movies and games without paying?’, was chosen as the winner in an event sponsored by The Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics and The Department of Philosophy at the University of Manitoba.

The main argument in the essay is that file sharing benefits society. If you take away the copyright issues and look at the base argument that sharing information benefits society, I think you can successfully argue that point. Almost every invention has been based upon someone else’s work. What if the man who first started a fire sent caveman lawyers (thugs with clubs) to trample other fires? What if he said that if you want to have fire, I have to be paid? We’d probably be sitting cold in a cave still.

I’m not advocating for copyright infringement, file sharing or any other types of illegal behaviour, but we are getting a little out of control with companies enforcing copyright. Yesterday the UVEX sporting supplier web page was updated with a little poem titled ‘Blonde we like wins Downhill (Last name rhymes with "Bonn")’. Why? Because the International Olympic Committee said they could not use a skier’s name, someone who they have sponsored, on their website. They even had to take down old articles with her name included. A little bit of overkill.

Or you may have heard about Google taking down music blogs because of supposed ‘copyright infringement’, even though some of those blogs had permission from the labels to put them up.

You’re reading this right: Five years of Lipold’s labor of love was deleted, in part, because he posted a track with full permission of a label, and the track apparently wasn’t even online by the time the IFPI filed its complaint.

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