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cory doctorow
bought enough music to end up where I am.
You know what I would totally buy? A record player that let
me play everybody’s records. Right now, the closest I can come to
that is an open source app called VLC, but it’s clunky and buggy
and it didn’t come pre-installed on my computer.
Sony didn’t make a Betamax that only played the movies that
Hollywood was willing to permit — Hollywood asked them to do
it, they proposed an early, analog broadcast flag that VCRs could
hunt for and respond to by disabling recording. Sony ignored them
and made the product they thought their customers wanted.
I’m a Microsoft customer. Like millions of other Microsoft
customers, I want a player that plays anything I throw at it, and I
think that you are just the company to give it to me.
Yes, this would violate copyright law as it stands, but Micro-
soft has been making tools of piracy that change copyright law
for decades now. Outlook, Exchange, and MSN are tools that abet
widescale digital infringement.
More significantly, IIS and your caching proxies all make and
serve copies of documents without their authors’ consent, some-
thing that, if it is legal today, is only legal because companies like
Microsoft went ahead and did it and dared lawmakers to pros-
ecute.
Microsoft stood up for its customers and for progress, and
won so decisively that most people never even realized that there
was a fight.
Do it again! This is a company that looks the world’s roughest,
toughest anti-trust regulators in the eye and laughs. Compared to
anti-trust people, copyright lawmakers are pantywaists. You can
take them with your arm behind your back.
In Siva Vaidhyanathan’s book
The Anarchist in the Library,
he talks about why the studios are so blind to their customers’
desires. It’s because people like you and me spent the ’80s and
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