Digital Freedom

[ukb008]

There's a news item in my favorite newssheet: Is Your Printer Spying On You? (http://www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/). Well, although the quote is a specific issue, the item is actually laden with hidden dimensions. What exactly constitute Digital Freedom? More generically, what is Freedom?

Freedom is not about what we can do; it's about what we can't. (Now I forget...who said that?)

The horror of 9/11 is still vivid in my mind. If this idea of freedom is carried all the way through, then there can't be any checks in the society, because any kind of check potentially curb freedom or privacy.

The movie Dirty Harry (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066999/) may have made a pertinent point. The sniper had rights of all kinds, but what about the rights of those he killed?

In Asia I have seen hundreds of copies of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0385504209/qid=1122777854/sr=8-5/ref=pd_bbs_5/102-5447504-9129716?v=glance&s=books&n=507846) - all illegally printed - selling on the sidewalks. The men printing them were exercising their rights, no doubt.

No, I'm not advocating for a society where a Big Brother is always watching you. But it's not a simple matter to decide exactly where to draw the line, or, if there's no line (which is likely), then how do define the grey area.

Regards.

[Mug Funky]

hmm. i think freedom extends to any activity that is not morally reprehensible by a reasonable person.

the catch in that is that a "reasonable person" depends very strongly on the society that person exists in. what's happening at the moment is that society is becoming less tolerant of a lot of things, and (in my opinion of course) is becoming less "reasonable".

if religion ever did good, it was to set morals to a standard reference that anyone could work from. it meant that a "reasonable person" would stay more-or-less constant so long as everyone held to the religion's moral code. nowadays our culture has so many ideas of how to live one's life that nobody can say for sure what is right and wrong, especially in the (massive) grey areas.

my feeling on freedom and morality et cetera is if you wouldn't like it done to you, don't do it to other people. i think somebody in history said that before... of course even this simple principle assumes it's being executed by a sane person. by that logic, a masochist would be allowed to randomly inflict pain on people without guilt.

digital freedom is a subset of the above. my head says people's intellectual property should be protected to the extent that it is still useful to society at large, but allows the originator to make a healthy living off their ideas. my heart says it wants to listen to as much music or see as much media as it can find, and pay for only the stuff it likes. i guess i stand somewhere between those points. i've got the advantage of working for a company that distributes movies and anime and occasionally music, so i get to be thoroughly sick of some things before they even make it into the mainstream (like inuyasha! that show never ends! how many villages can these people breeze into? surely they've covered all of ancient japan by now).

[edit] i added some stuff.

[Doom9]

The men printing them were exercising their rights, no doubt.No they are not. Even in countries with rampant piracy, it is still illegal. It's just that the law enforcement agencies have more pressing problems.