US Copyright Law, King Lear, and Jammie Thomas-Rasset

I've dropped my paid membership to AuthorsDen and had no intention to write more pages here.  But copyright is a subject that should be of critical interest to anyone who creates content for sale, so I thought AD would be a good place to post this.

This topic should be especially interesting to those writers, musicians and artists who actually believe the current copyright system is a perfect environment for protecting their works.

So, I would like to direct you all to this article by Pamela Jones of Groklaw.  It outlines the reasons why Shakespeare would never have been able to write King Lear if the copyright regime that we have today had been active in his day.  It's a worthy tale that should give all of us food for thought.

US Copyright Law, King Lear, and Jammie Thomas-Rasset

Now, I'd like to address the rest of this message to the jurors in the Jammie Thomas-Rasset trial:

Dear Jurors,  I hope you never look too closely at your own computers, because I will guarantee that you have copyrighted content on it that you didn't ask permission to have.  Content that, by todays restrictive standards, could brand you as a thief. 

You need to understand just how thin the line is between you and Jammie Thomas-Rasset.  The thugs from the RIAA and MPAA could be suing you next, or your kids, or your neighbors and friends. Their lives will be ruined and YOU will have to carry a large portion of the blame. I hope you can live with that...well, actually, I hope you never get another night's sleep over it.

Over 30,000 citizens, in the USA, have been sued by the RIAA/MPAA mafia over the last few years, including elderly people, small children, seriously ill people, dead people, teenagers, college kids, along with people that never even owned a computer, but none of it matters to the Mob.

That number is now growing worldwide. It's time to pull the plug on the mobsters and their extortion racket.