[free-sklyarov] Re: Rallies on Monday

[Jeme A Brelin]

On Sat, 21 Jul 2001, y s wrote:
> >I cannot imagine a better thing to do with my time than fighting >corporate 
> >tyrrany.
>
> O yeah, tyrrany, really.

Absolutely.  Tyranny.  The way the corporations are destroying the public
sphere and making it so that the only legitimate interaction is commercial
interaction.  EVERYTHING is described in terms of the market.  The
corporations buy laws and we, the people, have no real way of removing
their politicians from office because the corporations own the media as
well... so even when a good candidate comes along with money of his own
(or money directly from the people), the candidate cannot begin to compete
for airtime and is treated by those corporate reports as a kind of anomaly
or joke.

> I happen to know many guys from Adobe. They are very smart and
> hardworking, and they consider Adobe a great place to work.

I'm sure MANY of the people who work for Adobe are good, smart people who
work hard.  I'm sure many of them consider Adobe to be a great place to
work.

But Adobe (the corporation) exists only to make money by preventing people
from doing what is normal and natural: sharing information.  This is true
of ALL commercial software companies.

> They created great products, unlike Sklyarov and his company, who just
> try to make bucks on breaking and reverse engineering other's
> software. Sure, Elcomsoft loves all this noise, it is free
> advertisement for them, that they would never get otherwise.

Elcomsoft is just as evil as Adobe in my book.  And neither of them are
breaking the laws of their nation.

Sklyarov, however, is an individual human being and merely an employee of
an evil corporation.  He makes choices on more complex criteria than "how
can I maximize my profit?" and that makes him superior to ALL commercial
entities.

Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested after committing no known crime.  Writing the
software attributed to him is not illegal in his country... and the
distribution of the software was done by Elcomsoft, not Dmitry Sklyarov.

Again, if we are going to start punishing individuals for the sins of
their employers, MOST Americans are looking at doing hard time.

> >2) If you're implying that the Soviets were really communist, you've got a 
> >whole lot of reading to do.
> I, for one, don't need any more reading, I lived there. But if you are 
> talking of reading, - open Gulag Archipelago, rather than leftist media 
> (both here and there).

Communism, as described by Marx who coined the term, is a state where
regulation is simply not required.  He used the term interchangeably with
"utopia".  I'm simply arguing that the Soviets were not communists in this
sense... and, in fact, in no sense at all.

> >Not a communist, but I know one when I see one.
> Take a mirror.

I don't think we're quite ready for communism yet... we have too many
issues of scarcity to resolve first.

When all things are abundant, surely I will be a communist.
J.
-- 
   -----------------
     Jeme A Brelin
    jeme at brelin.net
   -----------------
 [cc] counter-copyright
 http://www.openlaw.org