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Technology Stocks : WDC/Sandisk Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ausdauer who wrote (13430)	7/30/2000 12:38:45 AM
From: TimF	Respond to of 60323

I'm not really for tobacco taxes either but those taxes are to discourage use of a harmful product. CDRs, internet connections, and flash memory are not generally considered harmful products. Also tobacco taxes go to the government. I think the government takes too much of our money but taxes are less obviously theft (argueably taxes are theft but are nessiary anyway) then when a private orginization uses the government as a weapon to extort a fee for products it doesn't have anything to do with the manufacture, sale, or distribution of. The basic thought seems to be "some people might use X (CDR or napster or whatever) to unfairly abuse the copyright owned by Record companies (or perhaps software companies), therefore we must charge a fee for all uses of X whatever use they put it to even if it does not violate copyrights to make sure that there is no way that the copyright owners do not get compensated for their copyrights. To make 100% sure that the copyright owners don't get screwed out of some of their money you make 100% sure that people who do not use the copyright will still pay for it. I think that is wrong. The answer is to try an enforce copyrights, and obtain just compensation for the owners of the copyrights, but only from those who use the copyrighted material. If the copyright owners lose money to piracy that is bad but they should not be able to take it out on someone else. If they can't catch or deter the pirates (or sell enough of the material that the piracy is only an unimportant marginal activity) then the copyright owners should be stuck with the losses, instead of being able to throw them on to a third party. Tim