[dvd-discuss] COMDEX speech

[Scott A Crosby <scrosby(at)cs.rice.edu>]

From slashdot:

http://money.cnn.com/2002/11/19/technology/comdex_chernin/index.htm

''Media to tech: Stop stealing!  News Corp.'s COO says media and tech
companies must cooperate to stop digital theft of content.''


My response is:

  Why do we listen to these cultural squatters, who sit on our culture
  and claim they have a right to take it?

  Who listens to these speculators, who hoard cultural creations
  hoping that someday they might win it big?

  Who pays attention to these meglomaniacs, who try to perpetually
  hold our heritage hostage and control every use and access.

  Who set up the modern intellectual feudalism, where you have kings,
  dukes, and other nobility fighting over fiefdoms of our intellectual
  and cultural landscape. Nobility who rape the peasants who are
  subject to their idiosyncratic and meglomaniac wills

  Who are these people who claim that every work that is not created
  by them is a 'shallow reinterpreation' that should be burned, yet
  the nobility's creations are invariably unique and special.

  If they shall call me a thief, pirate, and shoplifter.. Well, what
  shall these men and women be called?


Yeah, I'm preaching to the choir, but on the other hand, if they want
to use invective language, why shaln't we come up with our own?

Its easier to say that we're academics trying to protect ourselves
from cultural squatters, artistics speculators, and intellectual
feudalism than it is to say that we're academics trying to protect
thieves and pirates from the long arm of the law.

Scott