New Scientology Video -- and the Death of Copyright?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Lauren Weinstein [lauren () vortex com]
Sent: Friday, February 08, 2008 4:29 PM
To: David Farber
Cc: lauren () vortex com
Subject: New Scientology Video -- and the Death of Copyright?

Greetings.  Over on my blog I've just posted an entry regarding a
fascinating and bizarre new Scientology video that has just surfaced
on YouTube, outlining plans for "the global obliteration of
psychiatry" ( http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000368.html ).

This is of course the second Scientology vid to pop up recently, the
first being the now infamous Tom Cruise interview.

We can bet that Scientology will move rapidly to issue take-down
orders to YouTube and that at least the initial copies will vanish
there quickly -- but we all know that once out of the bottle such
materials will circulate publicly forever.  All the king's horses
and all of L. Ron Hubbard's men won't be able to regain control over
that video again.

But this is simply one example relating to a much broader and
extremely important question.  Given the widespread public
availability of effectively unlimited disk space, vast communications
capabilities, powerful encryption, and related technologies, is the
very concept of copyright (as we've known it up until now) rapidly
sliding toward the dustbin of utter obsolescence, despite desperate
attempts at life support?

Something to think about.  More to come.

--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren () vortex com or lauren () pfir org
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
http://www.pfir.org/lauren
Co-Founder, PFIR
   - People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org
Co-Founder, NNSquad
   - Network Neutrality Squad - http://www.nnsquad.org
Founder, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com


-------------------------------------------
Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com