10 April 2013

Blocked again

I've only been blocked on Twitter once before, that I know of.  That was by Helen Razer and to this day, I have no idea why.  I only know that I was blocked, because I went to follow her one day and found that I could not.

But I thought I'd regale you with this tale of more blockage.  This time, it came about in a record quick exchange with some tetchy Belgians who run an online magazine that goes by the name of Side-Line Magazine.

Specifically, it was this article that suggests reasons why you can't re-sell electronic media files once you've bought them.  It reads as a defence of DRM, because the reasons given is that once you have the file, you might copy it before you re-sell it.  Just "might", mind you - we're not all pirates.

This, of course, means that you should not be able to re-sell CDs, which are totally able to be re-sold.  Why not?  Because, and here's the word "might" again, you might copy the files on the CD before you re-sell it.

Now the act of re-selling files is not necessarily illegal.  However act of copying is, and so I pointed out in a tweet that there was a baby and bathwater issue, and an inconsistent one at that in a tweet.  I also may have expressed some dissatisfaction with the notion that we all need to be protected from our inherently evil nature:
Almost immediately, I got this back:
I'm quite curious who Side-Line Magazine are, now.  Ostensibly, they're notionally a magazine about industrial and darkwave European music, which I still find interesting.  It's not unheard of for record companies to shill for themselves with magazines, although whilst I'm not suggesting that Side-Line Magazine are a record company shill, a small part of me won't deny the possibility.  And very few ordinary people (i.e. not industry types or the odd musician) take the approach that the precautionary principle must prevail in the battle against wholesale privacy.  DRM is the precautionary principle with brute force - it's there to stop people copying files.  But DRM stops a number of other things, as well.  Things like resale of goods that you've paid for.

This is where the baby gets thrown out with the filthy suds.  It's inconsistent to not apply this to media containing the same electronic files.  We're now seeing licensing tightening up in software land to prevent electronic files and media being re-sold - witness the extraordinary lengths that Microsoft is going to with Windows 8 and Office 2013.  But files are still easily copyable from CDs, and if you were to suggest tomorrow that people could not re-sell these particular items, there would be a resulting minor state of martial law.

So I pointed this out to them:
to which I got the following response:
which is, of course, a load of rubbish. Remember, the illegal act is copying. You prove someone is guilty first - you don't just assume that they're going to break the law:
Of course, I also had to point out to them their inconsistency on the ease of copying files from CDs:
I wasn't expecting this in response:

"Leads nowhere". Well, of course it does.  They've assumed that users are always guilty.  Then they've effectively ignored the issue of file storage media outright, denied the presumption of innocence and to top it all off, gone off on some bizarre victim-blaming rant where laws and preventative mechanisms are conflated and people are now responsible for having their own homes burgled.

I think that I might have crossed the line, though, because the next thing I tweeted was this, in a fit of anger...
...and that saw me blocked for only the second time that I'm aware of.  What do you think?

2 comments:

-blessed holy socks, the non-perishable-zealot said...

Wiseabove, pal. If you say there isn't a God, I say we shall ALL return to Jesus when you croak (your soul is indelible) and because I was an actual NDE, lemme share with you what I actually know Seventh-Heaven's gonna be like for me, YOU if you get in the boat, brudda: meet this ex-mortal Upstairs for the most-extra-groovy, pleasure-beyond-measure, Ultra-Yummy-Reality-Addiction in the Great Beyond for a BIG-ol, kick-ass, party-hardy, 10110110-yummy-flavors you DO NOT wanna miss the smmmokin’-hot-deal. YES! For God, anything and everything and more! is possible!! RSVP? Cya soon.

NewcastleBoy said...

hello Dikkii :)