'If the government begins to act outside the rule of law it becomes a tyranny ..."

Yes, if they too lazy to document their tactics things arent looking good.

Vote is the easiest way to get rid of a bad government, armed rebellions sounds like it would a lot of work.

These movie and music distributors behave like they dont give a damn about the rest of society, they seem to spend all their time plotting the best way to take all our stuff, no consideration to ethics or morality at all.

Its like they are bunch of PIRATES !!!

Its time to turn the tables with this "pirates" tag and stick on them.

From now on consider usign the term "MPAA Pirates" or "RIAA Pirates"

Charging for patches also discourages propoer software maintenace techniques.

Team Fortess 2 was released over 4 years ago, its ongoing popularity on the PC is mostly due to its good maintenace technices, either bugfixes or updated content coming out every few days. Idiotic patch policy like M$'s is why it failed on XBox.

A culture that belives patches are a sign that something is wrong is ... i dont even have the words...

Only a republican would format conditionals in such a haphazard and condesending manner ! ;)

'Western liberal arrogance leads us to condescendingly believe we know what's best for Africans. It's the worst racism of all.'

I might also ask how you would rate linching. that is hanging, burning at a stake, or shooting a pewrson based on skin color. Is that not as bad as'knowing whats best for africans' ?

"Nearly 3,500 African Americans were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968, mostly from 1882 to 1920." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching

"Western liberal arrogance leads us to condescendingly believe we know what's best for Africans. It's the worst racism of all."

Really, you think misguided assistance is worse than intentional harm, really ?

Or where you just repeating somethign you heard because it sounded politically correct ?

+1 Excellent retort, but last paragraph was too long.

I'll try and be more precise in future.

"If I was making money from Free software then of course I would want to get it distributed as widely as possible - that's the point of Free software"

And if the point of creating a song or movies is to share a story then they should want it distributed as widely as possible as well.

Sounds like you want to here from people who care more about the money they make from copyright than they do about their art.

You dont understand art.

"Just once I would like to hear from genuine copyright holders on slashdot who both make a living from their creative works *AND* support un-regulated torrenting and file sharing"

Im sure there are lots of programmers here that make a living from creating software (a creative work) and support file sharing.

Or are you only interested in hearing from copyright holders that dont write Free software ?

Well its on the internet, so it must be true !

I guess