I don't think that anyone would say the primary purpose of a bookseller or a garage sale is to provide items to dealers/resellers looking solely for the most valuable items. And many would agree that those sorts of vultures reduce the enjoyability of both bookstores and garage sales. So imho, if there is a way to limit that sort of patron, eg via banning barcode scanners, so much the better.
Reminds me of the problems with resellers attending garage sales: it takes all pleasure out of leisurely perusing sales, and perhaps finding something you'll take home and actually give new life to, to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with dealers looking for items they can turn a profit on. And from the one garage sale I have held, I can tell you dealers drive hard bargains in the most unpleasant way to get you to sell to them at ridiculous, disrespectfully low prices. They are selfish leeches and shouldn't be allowed at garage sales either.
It's peeved them ever since www and graphical browsers came along that they weren't controlling or making money off all this human interaction. The technology (and their lack of understanding of it) cut government out of the loop from the start.
I really think the Wachowski brothers had it right with The Matrix imagery. Our government sees us as nothing more than perpetual energy sources for its own sustanence and immortality. So I'm all for limiting their power while we still can.
I think our government operates from an assumption that is both paranoid (we're all trying to steal what they're entitled to) and unreasonably controlling (a stance that dates back to Puritan times where citizens weren't to be trusted with autonomy).
So actually, government's attitude is ruining both society and the music industry by stifling freedom of expression.
And it may be reasonable to conclude that the more government tightens its control of who can play or listen to music, and certainly over who can modify it, the greater the decline in creativity in society as a whole. Not good, grim outlook in fact.
I suppose it will take someone well funded enough to fight this all the way to the Supreme Court. Given their surprising interpretation of the First Amendment recently, I suspect they would rule in favor of creative freedom.
We seem to operate out of a misplaced Puritan holdback of 'any freedom is evil' and 'humans are inherently evil and must be controlled lest they be themselves', which could only equal evil in this mindset. It's completely ass backwards and results in a total thwarting of creativity.
Without an atmosphere of assumed trustworthiness, how can our society thrive and move forward at all? The music industry (and the film industry) are symptomatic of a much bigger problem. I believe it needs to be fought against aggressively and nipped in the bud before government usurps any more control by crushing individual freedom and creativity. But I don't have any good ideas of how to stop this nauseating trend.
The rule on staying alive as a program manager is to give 'em a number or give 'em a date, but never give 'em both at once.