But, meanwhile, it looks like many of these same lawmakers are ready to completely sell out our freedom not out of a fear of terrorism, but out of a fear of the mere possibility of copyright violation. One of the most important bits in that article is the last paragraph, an excerpt from which I've quoted at the top of this page. The problem is that right now, we're introducing legislation which will incidentally quash individual's freedom of expression, so that we can artifically preserve the business models that let some people make a lot of money today. The argument of the recording industry is that by allowing the new technology to fully express itself, we will be destroying the ability of musicians to create. But that's much like arguing that nobody would have been able to make money on transportation if we didn't legislate the survival of the buggy whip industry at the beginning of this century.
Industries become obselete and die, but new ones come and take their place.
In the digital world, if we allow freedom, there will be doubtless all sorts of opporunities we haven't even thought of. Trying to force old business models on an environment where they no longer make sense, by making illegal the things that do make sense, only causes individuals to suffer. As a result, technological and legal measures have been and are being developed that give these large centralized power bases more and more control over what individuals can and can not do- so that, perversely, individual expression will be more controlled in the digital world than it was before the widespread advent of digital technology. While this may sound minor in comparison to some of the other crises of the world, I think most people would agree that individual freedom, and freedom of expression, is one of the pillars on which today's Western Civilization is built. We value it, and it is crucial that we insure that it survives.