Re:Communism (Score 1)

Success = evil? Depends on what you think success is. "I can see it now .. in the future we'll all leech..." I can see it now. Many online sites rely on fans to enhance their products for no pay at all. Game companies, Winamp, and many more rely on fans to supply content and downloads to enhance their products. This content and the downloads add value to the product, but the content providers get nothing for their labor. This is happening on a wholesale basis, yet there are no laws preventing the online companies from profiteering on their fans. "We slowly rot... where no one strives to innovate". Substantiate this! There is no proof of this. China is thriving. The USSR crumbled due to mismanagement and graft, and economic pressures and sanctions against them by Capitalist countries. Innovation in the US is motivated by money. You're saying that if you can't line your pockets, then why innovate? That's short sighted. Innovate because you can. Ambition, when motivated by money, is misdirected. That's not ambition at all. Our rights are deteriorating rapidly. You gotta piss in a bottle to get a job, as if the company hiring you owns ALL of your time. Companies offer 'competitive' wages -- apply now and find out what 'competive wages' means. You have the right to assemble, as long as you ask for a permit. You have a right to free speech, as long as you don't offend anyone. You have a right to bear arms, as long as the 'arm' is meant for hunting. You have a right to privacy, but you gotta piss in a bottle to be worthy of having privacy. Money is not everything. Innovation can be applied here. Napster allows me to share music I have bought, and allows me to get music I've already paid for, though it's in a different format (mp3s). Innovation is not equal to making money, and if you only want to innovate to make money,and believe that making money is all that innovation is good for, you got some thinking to do. Innovation needs to be applied to capitalism! Captitalism is flawed, and severely, with ramifications extending in all directions. The US has the highest crime rate in the world. Corporations maneuver to gain market share, and even maneuver to force other companies out of the market, or take control of another corporation. People buy stocks in companies, in the hopes that other people will later find them more valuable so that they can make a profit. These innovations are motivated by greed. Surely, we need motivations that are not motivated by greed! We need to move toward a sharing, communist society. This 'every man for himself attitude' is not God's law. And the amount of money you make is not a measure of success. If it is, it surely is twisted. And it is, and it surely is twisted! Success can be measured in many ways. You can measure success by a. How many smiles it brought to people's faces. b. How many people some act or action brought together. c. Pervailing against insurmountable odds. d. Innovation that makes people happy. Napster has gained accomplished three out these four. Recording companies sign contracts with artists for a certain amount of time. After the time has passed, the record companies are the only ones making any profit from sales. The same holds true in television production. After a show is canceled, it can be syndicated, and many performers don't reap benefits from the syndication, but the producers and syndicators do. Napster is an innovation that allows people to share the music they have. What is wrong with sharing? Pray tell! What in the world is wrong with sharing? Obviously, capitalists find this intrisically evil, and a very threat to their existance. So they have laws written protecting them from people sharing what they have bought. Now, don't you think that this is selfish, if not evil? Napster is truly innovative! It just presents problems for the people who sell music, and the number of people who sell music are far fewer than the number of people that listen to music. So, the capitalists say this is wrong! By what measure? By the measure of how well they can line their pockets. If you think that thier rights outweigh people's rights to share, then you are truly lost! The record companies are claiming that people are using Napster to share on a wholesale basis. So? Whats wrong with sharing with everyone? Is sharing with everyone and anyone bad? Or should sharing be limited to only within a small group of people, like close friends and family? What's wrong with saying 'everyone is my friend'? And finally, the record companies have nothing to fear. The mp3s I've downloaded vary in quality from very good to poor. Thes mp3s' quality follow a bell curve, with the majority of them being mediocre at best. People are recording these mp3's on not so professional sound equipment. If I want to listen to the best recording I can, I gotta revert to the tapes and CD's I've bought, or spend a lotta money on audio mixiing software, then lots of time cleaning up these mp3s to sound as good as the originals. The audio software costs $400, and the time it takes to restore a mp3 to original quality isn't worth it when I can go to the music store and buy a CD for $12 to $15! So, all this legal maneuvering by the recording industry against Napster is unwarranted and just plain paranoid. If you ask me, Napster is a step in the right direction to distribute the wealth, and bring lots of smiles to lots of people's faces, including musicians! The real trouble is, the only way the record companies can capitalize on Napster (and this is not so innnovative) is to get an injuction to make napster unavailable to people, and sue Napster and Co for damages. They have, by God! Because they have the right! Yet our rights to share go unprotected.