[RN_Grp3] Copyrights

Zune, Microsoft's futile attempt to dent the iPod empire, recently hit the stores.

1) Its main offer to the users: the music sharing function ('Welcome to the social"). A nice idea, regarding the sharing culture of the younger Internet generations. However, the function turned out to be frustrating. You can download a song from a peer's machine, but the song will last only three plays or three days whichever comes first. After that, the file self-destructs, leaving only a ad tag that indicates you should buy it if you liked it.

2) Then, the card it offered to the industry: give Universal records $1 for each machine sold. The record companies have long been asking Apple to share the hardware sales profit with them, in vain. Now Microsoft kisses their backs. I wonder how Microsoft will deal with all the other numerous record companies.

Both instances indicate the ridiculous outcomes, if you want to exploit old-fashioned copyright concepts and at the same time pretend to be up-to-date. In the former, even the self-recorded garage band demos cannot be effectively shared and spread through the Net - that is, you do not have the ability to control your own copyright. In the latter case, Microsoft is paying a mutated form of 'copyright fee' to the record company for making their music available on their machine, by providing them with a fee for sales of a machine that the company does not have anything to do with.

Copyright, like all the other individual rights, become laughable caricatures of their original intent if left without proper restrictions. In a country where Disney successfully modifies the laws over and over again to prevent Mickey Mouse from coming into the public domain forever, it can be safely said that such restrictions are largely lacking. If the law does not provide the restrictions, the user practices and common sense should step into play. It is the gap that must be bridged, between the already present structure of networked information use by the general users and the commercial industry system that would rather like to stick to the old days where you could sell... Vinyl records and stuff.