Quote - Microsoft doesn't give a damn about those lawsuits, see how much money it has.

They have lost several big lawsuits lately, even had to release some source code, thats progress if you ask me. They lose increasingly many lawsuist these days, thats why i said there is a rising trend towards taking the threat of monopolies serious and doing something about it.

Quote - People are selling away their freedoms....

how?

Quote - Spore, the game's DRM system, SecureROM which has wrecked many people's PCs, and that's far from the 1st case of such so-called "anti-piracy" software doing that (I had 3 hard drives fail in a row some years ago, due to such software and I had bought the damned games, yet I, the honest guy gets screwed).

As crappy as that is, it is the anti-piracy software that causes this, not the copyright law. Without a copyright law there would still be a stimulus to try and make copying difficult.

Quote - Piracy and logic finally brought the bloated prices and illegal systems of some of the big software apps down to more sane levels.
Small companies can get wrecked by piracy, mostly if their app has limited use. But the wider an app is used, the more piracy is free marketing and training in it...that was the dirty secret the "Big boys" didn't want to talk about.

Yet without the constant efforts to limit piracy the music business might already have gone tits-up long ago. If we all would pirate all our music, what would musicians live from?
If small companies can get wrecked by piracy, then how does that make copyrighting a bad thing?

Quote - There was no damned way ordinary bods could afford their apps, the only way to get market share is to have a lot of folk using their apps, and training in them takes years...so a Catch22 situation that required piracy to exist, lol

which is why simple individuals arent sued.. 

Quote - That's why the finally brought out "personal learning editions". of their apps.

i see no problem here?

Quote - If you think that's crazy, here's a snippet of the hypocrisy in the music business:
The big record companies paid companies to monitor which songs were traded most on P2P networks, so they would know which tracks were most popular.

And the general consensus was that tracks over 15 year old made up for over 75% of those traded.
Why? To an extent, older demogrpahics for having PC/broadband, but largely, the recent music is mostly crap, because the greedy record companies only wanted cheap "fluff" product, which has no "staying power", and thus, they wrecked their own business. LOL. 

That sounds very logical to me, but i still dont understand how this makes copyrights and trademarks bad? The current commercial music business is aimed at making quick money, there is no one trying to hide that.

Quote -  That's a simplification of course, changing habits, such as mobile phone costs of teenagers etc also eat into music money, so all combined, is why the record ocmpanies are nose diving, not because of piracy, it's piracy that made interest in music recover in ways.
Again, you need wide spread user base as KEY, to make money. Folk who download a track for free will thus listen to music off the cuff to try it, thus may enjoy it and go buy tracks, also they don't want albums where 90% of it's not wanted, they want single tracks.

I have family in the music biz and they loathe the big companies who gobble up the lion's share of profit, and therefor bands stay independant, make money from gigs, merchandise, and online sales far better they can with the "leeches".

Everyone with common sense knows that but the RIAA etc bang away and all they do is make folk hate them, refuse to buy their product or work for them and...the corporates nosedive. Serves them right. They don't give a hoot about the artist or the music, all they care about is $.

We don't have "Capitalism" we have "Corporate Oligarchies". Consumer laws only catch up, like criminal laws, when heinous abuses hurt many folk, alas. They are a step behind the curve. 
Also the sheer power and multi-nation spread of the corporations, means it's very hard to deal with them, indeed. They can just threaten to move to another country and thus take jobs...

As said, we've all been fed the "Mushroom Treatment", because who owns the media, who has billions to promote the views they want...? ;)

Only living human beings should any "copyright protection". And that primarily so that they are always identified as the "creator".
Allowing unreal things like corporations to have copyrights, is incredibly dangerous, you are giving power to an immortal, ammoral entity with no concern except shareholders (Who're often the execs nowadays).

Corporations do not exist as real things, I have never met one, have you? They are fictional co-operative units. Thus they should never have rights that trump those of real people.

Sorry for the sort of political spiel :)

all very valid stuff, but i still dont get how this makes trademarks bad.. 

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