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Showing posts from January, 2012

Why I support SOPA

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Mostly because I am a troll and because the extreme positions taken in this debate annoy me. So I take a bit of the "avocat du diable" (devils lawyer in french) position on this one. But let me clarify. I spent a good part of my professional life in the world of Free and Open Source Software (aka FLOSS). There as a producer of content I helped pioneer a model to make money off a free software product. We operated in the application layer of the internet and distributed our wares for free. In the FLOSS community, people are actually fairly educated when it comes to IP, licenses, trademarks, copyrights, patents etc. Lately I spend a lot of time in writing music and have got to see first hand who is impacted by the net. The goals of SOPA The goal is rather straightforward. Online piracy and counter-feit are rampant. Most people do not see "downloading a song, a movie, buying counter-feit products" as theft, it is perceived as innocuous. What is more technology has