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Friday, April 23, 2004

David Lawrence helps you legally download digital music that rocks

An Open Letter to Music Pirates and "DVD Jon":
No doubt you've all heard by now that you have a new tool you can use to pirate music, this time by stripping away the copy protection used by the iTunes Music Store. It's called QTFairUse, and it was created by the same misguided punk, Jon Johansen, that created DeCSS to crack DVDs. The title would seem to indicate that there is something in the fair use section of the Copyright Act that is relevant to the creation and use of QTFairUse.

Um, no.

You, Jon Johansen and others may have deluded yourselves into thinking that this tool is about fair use, but you're engaged in fantasy and mass rationalization. It would be helpful to the debate if you would stop such behavior and fortune-telling, and consider the actual facts.
He wants people to respect intellectual property rights.

Cory Doctrow had an iTunes horror story.

I don't think people should pirate music.

I think artists should get paid for their work.

I don't like copy protection that hinders my ease of use of media that I have paid for.