Re:First thing we must do... (Score 2, Interesting)

Lawyers are just the amoral middlemen of the real struggle going on. The fact that some people are so quick to blame these middlemen is a testament to how successful the right-wing corporate propaganda thinktanks have been. Lawyers do not even stand to profit from the introduction nor the restriction of new technologies. They only stand to profit from the dispute thereof. Every time you complain about a lawyer, what you're really supposed to be complaining about is big business. A lawyer doesn't personally care one way or another if there is an internet, or open source projects, or napster. It is a corporation who cares. It is the corporations who are interested in putting limits on mankind's productive faculties in order to enrich themselves. This is, of course, the exact opposite of what a social system is supposed to do and what the capitalist system claims to do. A system should encourage the production of goods in the most efficient means possible. That would mean things like being able to download music digitally at a production cost of approximately zero instead of going to a store and buying it on a relatively bulky and inefficient compact disk. Karl Marx of all people described this exact scenario as evidence of a productive system that has outstayed its historical usefulness. The property relations (property laws, producer-corporate-consumer relations, in a word, everything) have come into direct conflict with the means of production (PCs, the internet, personal CD/DVD burners). Our property relations are actually trying to destroy our means of production. Blaming lawyers for the law is like blaming a shotgun for murdering you. The real culprit is the actual person murdering you, whatever instrument he uses is incidental.